Boston University Working On LED Wireless Networks 179
Madas writes "This article on Absolute Gadget details how researchers at Boston University's College of Engineering are working on devloping wireless networks that use LED lights instead of normal radio waves. This research apparently has other uses in the automobile industry. Apparently the LEDs could warn you if the driver in front has put the brakes on so could avoid hitting the car in front. Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."
Brake Lights (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently the LEDs could warn you if the driver in front has put the brakes on so could avoid hitting the car in front
Dude aren't those called brake lights?
--
Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Re:Brake Lights (Score:4, Insightful)
Could be used to communicate the rate at which the brake pedal is pressed.
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You could have it so the brightness of the brake lights describes how far down the pedal is. You could even have it so if there's a sudden, heavy push to the pedal, they could blink rapidly.
Also, the people who ride their brake pedal won't be an annoyance to other drivers because their little pedal tap won't create a huge change in the brightness of their brake lights.
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I can think of two reasons:
1. A pressure sensor like that would be more complex and prone to error - probably require some kind of calibration.
2. Psychologically, you probably don't want people ignoring faint brake lights. I can already hear people complaining about how, say, Toyota uses brighter brake lights than Chevy and so so-and-so got confused about how hard the person was pressing the brake. It would also be hard to interpret the lights in varying light levels.
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Just replace the top/middle/third brake light with a large-ish display that shows the speed of the vehicle, if it starts dropping rapidly you know you need to brake.
Also handy when you're in fast moving traffic and round a bend to catch up to a vehicle, for several seconds you have no idea if it's stopped, going very slow or just slowish. if there's a fat "32" on it and your dash reads "64" you know to get over into the next lane.
If your dash display was also digital then when you crossed a border into a me
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2. If you're confused about how hard they were pressing the brake, then maybe you should have looked at how fast you were coming up to the rear end of their car. That's pretty much the same answer a cop would tell you now if the person you hit didn't have their brake lights on at all.
So then why implement this thing at all?
Re:Brake Lights (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem for me is if I rolled up on a random car and the brake light came on, I would have no idea whether it was on full brightness or some dimmed level. I'd have no choice but to act as if they had just stomped on the brake... same as today.
You could change the number of lights that come on instead of brightness. This might work if the light size and number of lights were standardized, but even then you wouldn't really know what the breaking characteristics of that particular car were. You could mitigate THAT by tying it to an accelerometer instead of the brake pressure.
But then you'd still have to do studies to see which way was safer :)
the simple solution (Score:2)
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your completely ignoring one very painful fact. every manufacture has different intensities for their lights. I was driving behind a large ruck whose tail lights where so bright I though he was riding his brake for half a mile, until he really did tap his brakes and they got even brighter.
While the tech is there it would require calibration of the lights, knowledge that older drivers have poor eyesight and need can't judge intensities as easily, as well as inspections to make sure they fall within the app
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I have a friend that owns a (new) Mini Cooper and having been on a run with the local Mini group one of the leaders had his central brake light replaced with a slick LED unit that blinked a couple of times every time he hit the brakes. Under the physical and mental strain of doing 30 MPH around multiple hairpin turns down hill this can help quite a bit in knowing he's braking while still using your peripheral vision as you follow the outside or inside curve of the road.
And believe me, these guys *stand* on
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A whole bunch of modern cars switch on the brake lights when you take your foot off the accelerator quickly (presumably in order to brake).
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Vision balls?
Single point of failure if you ask me. What type of nerd are you?
Re:Brake Lights (Score:5, Funny)
One with a pair of vision balls.
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Not to mention that such a feature (automatic braking based on the car in front of you) already exists. It uses radar, it just has to bounce a signal off the car in front of it. As it turns out, when a car starts braking, it starts to slow down, and that can be easily detected!
In fact, networking using LEDs also already exists: it's that IR port that no one uses any more because it sucks.
So congrats, Boston, you finally discovered LEDs and technology that has existed for what, two decades now?!
It does expla
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yeah it already exists and already can got to 100 mbit, but it's also short range as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association [wikipedia.org]
perhaps they are working on longer range communication, perhaps they are using frequencies other than infrared. it is true that bluetooth has basically killed IrDa. really, the only thing infrared data does better than radio wireless is be 'snoop' proof*. since it is directional, it can only be received by the intended recipient. this makes it ideal for certain
Re:Brake Lights (Score:4, Insightful)
should have RTFA, this is about using LEDS over ambient lighting, to broadcast data via power lines, to every light in the room, which is then received by every data device.
weird, but a quite a bit different from IrDa for one, it's using visible light. i can't think of any real reason to be broadcasting large amounts of data to multiple devices in a single room for consumer markets, but for instance a usb dongle on a laptop, and everyone in a lecture hall could receive all the notes from the class all at once, while listening to the lecture.
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What I get a kick out of is that this "automotive" use will fail miserably. first ignore that the auto makers are hostile and refuse to make things interoperate we'll only have fords responding to fords and so on.
Plus, every IR/light based communication system I have ever used fails 100% when exposed to direct sunlight. The sun can outpower any led you put in a taillight.
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This kind of thing would lead to people driving with their knees on the wheel, cell phone in one hand and a latte in the other, waiting for their cars to tell them to press the brake pedal. Let them do it -- I'll ride the bus while the rest of the nation competes for the coveted Darwin Award.
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> Dude aren't those called brake lights?
The light part would remain, to tell YOU the guy in front is braking. But now imagine that every light on every vehicle were also beaconing a unique identifier along with current speed and acceleration. You car would notice a car in front of you (because it has been seeing it with the front mounted sensor for a bit, thus it has to be in front and it could likely even know it is in the same lane) just started drasticly slowing down and you haven't hit your brakes.
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So the guy in front of me can send me spam through my HUD?
Fuck that.
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It's like using your garage door opener to scare that guy who just screamed past you by setting off his radar detector (don't think this one works any more though).
Re:Brake Lights (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, so YOU're the guy ... (Score:4, Funny)
with the braille instrument cluster.
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you joke.. recently my bank replaced the keypad (not the whole thing just the keypad) on the Drive through ATM with a braille one..
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There are often reasons for silly things...
Re:Oh, so YOU're the guy ... (Score:4, Funny)
The passenger's side can use it too! There's very little that's more hilarious than driving backwards through a crowded ATM. The best part is staring straight into the person "behind" you's eyes. I find an absolutely blank expression is best. Don't smile. Don't frown. Just stare, and drive backwards.
A word to the wise though: don't try this if you've got weed in the car. Let's be honest, if you're thinking about this, chances are pretty good...
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I did this at Mcdonalds. The kid behind the counter called his manager over, and his manager told me it was illegal.
I told him to fuck off and get my food.
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Why was I expecting:
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That's not actually a bad idea. Just because it's a drive up ATM, doesn't mean that the driver has to be the one using it. A blind passenger sitting in the rear seat behind the driver could use it.
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Blinded by those LED tail lights, no doubt.
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God I hate those things. The flickering distracts the crap out of me.
IRDA Anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wasn't there just a story about this on Slashdot two days ago?
Anyone else remember the exciting world of IRDA? How is this really going to be that much different (or better)?
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IRDA worked just fine, there's nothing wrong with IRDA. It got killed by Bluetooth, which requires more power and has less inherent security.
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No- it got killed because of reliability over any kind of a distance issues. You also had to always make sure the ports were clear of obstacles, which isn't very practical in an office or mobile environment. You could "kill" a network device (like a printer) with a post-it note.
I still remember (not-so-fondly) printing from my Palm device to an HP printer with IRDA. That was almost as agonizing as waiting for a 2400-baud modem to connect, and about as fast too. I also remember creating "ad-hoc" IRDA network
Re:IRDA Anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are certainly things you can do with bluetooth that you can't do with IRDA. I wouldn't want an IRDA headset, and I wouldn't use it over a distance, but BT gets used for all kinds of things that USB (yes, real wires) Wifi, and IRDA are better for.
Printers? Stick them on a network, don't wire them to a computer. If you want wireless access to a printer, use Wifi and Zeroconf/Rendezvous/Bonjour.
Headsets? Perfect application for Bluetooth.
Sharing files, PDA to PDA? You *want* short range and directionality. IR is ideal.
Mice and keyboards? Been there, done that, got the dead batteries and incomplete mess
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I think I am old enough to recall that. There was talk about IrLAN based on IrDA, with pods in office ceilings that computers, printers etc. would connect to for networking. The bandwidth wouldn't have been sufficient to last us through the Internet explosion, but the idea of free range optics of those days were apparently ahead of their time.
Re:IRDA Anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
These look pretty. Maybe they'll use blue LEDs. Everything is better with blue LEDs.
I remember arcnet. (Score:2)
Anyone else remember the exciting world of IRDA?
Not only that, I remember Arcnet.
Very early on in computing there was Datapoint's Arcnet. It was a token ring network that tied their early desktop machines (the SSL IC machines whose instruction set spawned the 8008) and their associated fileservers.
Options for interconnection included:
- copper cabling
- "Arclight" building-to-building infrared links. (They had separate transmitting and receiving lenses maybe a foot across each and were good
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Well, nowadays they have these super bright LEDs that they didn't have last century, so range may not be as much of an issue.
Vision Balls? (Score:5, Funny)
> Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."
Personally, I think the zipper gets in the way.
Might or might not work for army... (Score:2)
Light should be less susceptible for jam and interference.
But on the other hand, it would expose your position. (And they also have night goggle for IR light)
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Less susceptible to Jam and Interferences ?
Actually the good thing is that instead of tinfoil hats, we can just use paper hats !
Trust issues (Score:5, Insightful)
But the question is, do you REALLY trust the car in front of you? What if it just randomly transmits a "braking now!" message in order to cause other cars in the vicinity to put on their brakes?
It would be cool to see what you could do with this to improve traffic flow and autopilot in a controlled environment, but out in the real world the trust issues get pretty dodgy.
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The idea of P2P traffic systems is great in theory, but it fails as soon as someone decides to make a greedy or malicious node.
I've put a lot of thought into it because I like the idea, but I just can't get over the problem of greedy or malicious nodes without a government certificate system, like a digital license plate.
The problem then becomes there are all sorts of surveillance issues with government knowing which cars came into contact with which other cars and then also what happens when the certificat
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What if it just randomly transmits a "braking now!" message in order to cause other cars in the vicinity to put on their brakes?
That's possible now. Its called tapping your brake.
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That's possible now. Its called tapping your brake.
Yes, and so many people do it for no reason that a brake light by itself doesn't have much information content.
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We already have that in the analog world. My first car, a 1979 Pinto with a big dent on the side, would engage the backup lights if you moved the stick shift toward reverse - even while you were still in neutral. F'rinstance, if you happened to be driving on the highway.
Combine that false alarm with the Pinto's well-known tendency to blow up - reenforced by my "I XPLODE" vanity p
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My last Alfa had a rear foglight switch on the dash. I had it tested by a mate who was behind me, and it read "Fuck me, thats fucking bright", on his scale.
Really helped with tailgaters.
Hey, I've got a great idea! (Score:5, Funny)
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Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
This is amazing. Maybe they can put this technology in a small box that I can point at my TV so I don't have to get off the couch to change channels. Maybe they can use IR LEDs to reduce interference from ambient light which is mostly in the visible spectrum.
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Your ideas are crazy and impractical.
Also, they would cripple the helper monkey industry you heartless bastard.
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That will never work. What happens when you want to change the channel but can't see the TV? IR only works with line of sight.
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Terms (Score:2)
Stupid summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Cars communicating with each other is a good idea, and being worked on. Signalling that a car is braking is one obvious use, despite the stupid comment in TFS. Having the car react automatically to the car in front saves the 1+ second reaction time of the human driver, making you less likely to rearend someone. The only drawback is that you're relying on external inputs. This system won't stop for a pedestrian, or an older car (which doesn't broadcast its intentions in a machine-readable way), for instance. Radar seems a better bet for this particular application.
But there are more uses for a network between cars. Relaying congestion data is one, you could synchronize cars so they run at the same speed instead of harmonica-ing all the time (prevents traffic jams), etc.
Using LED signalling instead of radio might be a good way to avoid the problems with RF (interference, limited number of channels available).
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Dude, your brain takes a full second minimum to recognize the problem and start pressing on the brake peddle with any significant force. 1980's calculators could respond to external stimuli several orders of magnitude faster.
Computers can supplement driving performance no matter how good of a driver you, and everyone else, thinks they are. An existing, yet primitive example of this is ABS.
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As an excellent and safe driver who has been caught out by the 1-second delay between "oh shit" and physical action taking place on at least one expensive occasion, I'd welcome a system that can assist me in such situations.
Current implementations (radar cruise control, brake assist etc) are designed to engage only when the situation has become life-or-death, i.e. long after a competent driver would have taken action himself and changed the situation to non-lifethreatening. You're in control at all times, t
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As a programmer, I just don't trust computers enough to make life-or-death decisions for me.
Um, you work at Microsoft, right? =)
Because there IS non-buggy code out there. LASIK eye surgery would be impossible without the laser beams (that slice your eye's cornea) being controlled by computer. There are many other medical devices that are computer-controlled.
Fighter aircraft are "fly by wire". So's the space shuttle.
Fortunately for astronauts, fighter pilots, and LASIK patients you don't program these system
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Having the car react automatically to the car in front saves the 1+ second reaction time of the human driver, making you less likely to rearend someone
Not tailgating works, too. If you've ever rearended someone and your brakes worked, you're an idiot and should not be behind the wheel of an automobile.
This is NOT technology for the city. The car should ONLY decellerate/brake without human assistance when the cruise control is on.
Every time you brake, you turn momentum into heat. That momentum came from the
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Every time you brake, you turn momentum into heat. That momentum came from the combustion of an expensive liquid that I, for one, do NOT like to waste, as my name's not Warren Buffett.
My hybrid converts that momentum back into potential energy you insensitive clod!
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"you could synchronize cars so they run at the same speed instead of harmonica-ing all the time (prevents traffic jams), etc."
Perhaps my accordion will change your tune. How does traffic harmonica?
Here's a thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go ahead and patent this, Microsoft.
LED by example. Get it? Okay I'll stop.
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LEDs aren't needed for that. Just use an old-fashioned bulb, and put a potentiometer or rheostat on the brake pedal.
I can think of a few drawbacks, not the least of which is the brake light is supposed to get your attention.
I thought so too... until... (Score:2)
Your car as an intelligent system (Score:2)
This is a perfectly reasonable concept. It would be awesome if my car knew a few things about the car in front of it. If it was connected to it via an LED wireless network, then it could tell a few things about the next car, and the next, and the next. This would mean that minimum following distance was no longer constrained by human reaction speed, instead being limited more by the actual deceleration capabilities of the vehicle itself. A blowout in heavy traffic would no longer result in nine car pileu
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A blowout in heavy traffic would no longer result in nine car pileups.
Someone with an LED and malicious intent will do that for you now.
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Nope, not at all. This system would be dependent upon already existing technology which could tell you how close the person in front of you is to them. The worst thing that would happen would be that they could artificially cause you to slow down when you don't need to. Just a small amount of that where their actual location doesn't match the information that it's broadcasting would result in the assumption that the information they're presenting isn't reliable. At that point, the car would revert to norm
Forget the network (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey! Give that line back! (Score:2)
vision balls that are in my thought box.
Above line stolen shamelessly from Jon Stewart, referring to his take on CNN's "perception analyzer" graph in the Presidential/VP Debates.
:D
Not that I disapprove, or anything.
LED transmission has been used for years now. (Score:2, Informative)
Erm, they should take a look at this:
http://ronja.twibright.com/
instead of re-researching it from scratch.
And the project is opensource.
Woyteck
Once again.... (Score:2, Informative)
The brake light idea that the summary innaccurately mocks would actually allow the brakes in your car to be activated when your car "sees" the brake lights on the car in front of
Did they run out of pigeons or something? (Score:2, Funny)
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You were actually serious!
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html [faqs.org]
2005: Been There Done That (Score:5, Informative)
I knew I had seen an led-based point-to-point networking system described somewhere, and after a few minutes on hackaday, here it is [hackaday.com], straight from 2005. Best part is, the linked to Ronja [twibright.com] project is open, free speech-wise (and free beer for the major league scrounger).
Boston U's Link (Score:2)
The article was slashdotted, so I couldn't RTFA. Google turned up the Boston U project [bu.edu], where it seems they're looking to do something a bit more advanced that mere p2p networking.
LED Pay Phone Tap (Score:3, Interesting)
At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, in the Student Union on the main campus (not East Campus), there is still a bank of pay telephones under one of which is a large metal box with a single LED on it, still there even after the remodel since I was a student there. One day between classes I observed someone using that particular pay phone and seeing the LED on that box alternately flickering in concert with the person's lips, then again presumably in sync with the sound coming from the other end of that call. I've long thought that if I converted that brightness pattern back to sound, I could listen to both ends of the conversation at a distance.
And I also wondered what the purpose of that box truly was.
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Having seen devices like these in the past, chances are it is a telecommunications device for the deaf [wikipedia.org], in this case designed for payphones.
I presume there would have been instructions printed on the front of the device that would go something like this: If a deaf or hard-of-hearing person wants to make a phone call, they insert coins, then dial the number of interest. When they see the light on the other end flashing randomly (i.e. not a ringing or busy signal), they can press a key on the payphone's t
Big Bro (Score:2, Insightful)
George Bush wet dream.
Mandatory encoding of the cars VIN & speed into modulation of the cars parking led lights.
Makes that big brother tracking just one step easier.
802.11, anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
I recall that 802.11 contains a part that specifies using infrared for 1 and 2Mbit/s multipoint operation. Apparently since its inception in 1997. Getting a bit more bandwidth out of it would be nice though. And, uh, more implementations.
Compact Discs all over again! (Score:2)
Inevitably there will be a backlash to this technology, similar to what occurred in response to Compact Digital Audio discs. It will be spearheaded not by audiophiles but by photophiles, who will insist that persistence of vision is a myth and that any strobing effect, even measured in millionths of a second, is dangerous and will cause mental illness or cancer.
Mark my words....
Perfect! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, because thats why those lights are there, so that your car can hopefully help in that
I dunno, didn't RTFA. My vision balls are dry and red.
It's insecure (Score:2)
FTFA:
Not true, as mentioned in this old Slashdot article [slashdot.org]. Light emissions, even when they are not modulated, may transmit information that can be used by your enemies, for instance in wartime [wikipedia.org]
But I believe your suggestion of tinfoiling windows is good. Just use the same foil you have on your walls (you *do* use tinfoil for wallpaper, don't you?)
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...someone turns on another light source overpowering the LEDs ...something flies over the sensor (or worse yet lands on it) blocking reception of the data ...multple 'databulbs' in one room get out of sync, causing confusion in the device
Or when you're hospitalized due to the blinking lights causing a seizure.
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someone turns on another light source overpowering the LEDs
Light is just another frequency of electromagnetic radiation.
When I went to SIU in the late '70s, I had a very good Kenwood FM reciever. There was a ten watt college station operating near Forest Park in St Louis, 30 miles away. I could listen to that station, and did.
That was like seeing a ten watt night light in a sea of fifty thousand watt searchlights, and that was with technology available over 30 years ago! Your fears are unfounded.
something f
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No, no, no, the "box" is the skull.
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Uhh.. eyeballs are merely the extension of the brain, they in a sense ARE your thought box, just another aspect of your mind.
No, not the whole eyeball, just the retina and optic nerve. As doctors stuck needles in my left eye in 2006, turning me into a cyborg [slashdot.org] and giving me far better than a normal person's vision (20/15, before surgery it was 20/400 and I wore thick glasses since childhood. You will be assimilated.) and again this past April I've learned a lot about how eyeballs work. [slashdot.org]
If you damage your retin
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Well Interest depends on the reader and I found the journal entries interesting far more so than this article.
I did have the white flashes once that he talked about, I had just been hit on the temple with a beer bottle by my then girlfriend.
long time ago now, you've got to love a woman with a temper
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doing a search on the interwebs of famous blind people, I recognized the names of 4 people on the list, Louis Braille, Helen Keller, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
Who would you choose as an example of someone who is blind?
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Its pretty clear that if you are a KKK member like the AC then you are going to pick the nigger^W guy whos first on your mind.
Epic troll, Mr Nornoggin. You have my kudos.
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it forces you to leave all your lights on day or night if you want to maintain your WLAN connectivity.
personally, i think infrared networking is a better idea. sure you might save a little energy by merging your networking devices with existing light sources, but that's not exactly an ideal pairing. i often go to bed with my computer on with files downloading or seeding on BitTorrent. but my wireless router is in an adjacent room, so if i were to use an LED wireless network, i'd need to keep my door open an
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