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The Lamps Are The Network 139

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-then-the-lamps-are-the-computer dept.
An anonymous reader sent us an interesting story that talks about using the flickers in flourescent lamps to do something beside's give me headaches. They actually are using them as a network to send things like audio. There are numerous possible applications of this, but I'd tend to think some sort of other standard that would let us eliminate those cursed lights would be better. Regardless, it's a damn cool hack.
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The Lamps Are The Network More

The Lamps Are The Network

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  • Forgetting One Issue (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    polyp@tesco.net writes ...
    Aren't we forgetting something fundamental ?

    These things only broadcast data not receive it. To use these thngs as a true network one would need to get these babies to receive packets as well as transmit them!

  • Re:Whats Next? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That would be called "talking". Someone tried it and it's supposed to work but we evolved to use slashdot instead nowadays.

  • Re:neat hack but..... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What about those poor blind people when the bulbs are burned out?
    I dunno, I just thought this was funny for some reason.

  • Mr. Wizards World (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:37PM (#170760)
    Mr. Wizards World on Nickelodeon told of this a long time ago.

    In that story, it was grocery stores that were using them automatically update the price of items on the shelf. Instead of the normal tags on shelves, each item had a small LCD device in front of it that could "read" the flucuations in the flourescent lights.

    I saw this program somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago.
  • In related news, it has now been scientifically determined that "now the RIAA can deprive us of some basic facet of everyday life" trolls, are, in fact, no longer funny.

    --
  • "Once Leeb figured out how to transmit information via fluorescent lights, he racked his brain for applications."

    That, in a nutshell, is what hacking is all about.

  • Whee! I thought I was the only geek to do this!

    Castration of office flourescent light tubes is usually one of my top three goals when I start a new job:

    1. Kill flourescent lighting to eliminate flicker
    2. Establish myself as resident geek god and therefore beyond questioning when it comes to internet usage
    3. Force management to understand that I can wear a tie on days I want to without a problem, but if they force it on me the supply of oxygen to my brain is reduced and my productivity goes through the floor ... jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers are appropriate office attire, baby!

  • All I can think of is Tom Hanks escaping that awful flourescent lighting in Joe versus the Volcano. If only Meg Ryan could somehow be attached to the application of this technology...

    <peering about> "Wow! Why do all the chicks suddenly look like Meg Ryan?!"

    -l

  • Great. Now when they are about to burn out, all we will get is Nine Inch Nails... err, I mean static.

  • Hope they didn't get a US patent for this one. (Score:4)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @05:15PM (#170766)
    I remember this being one of the experiments you could do in the 1970s with one of those $30 children's 200-in-One electronics project kits. You'd use an incandescent bulb, if I recall, to transmit input from a microphone, and you'd receive it through a photocell, convert it back to audio and pass it to the earphone.

    I think it was one of the Israeli kits with the pinholes for sticking wires in, rather than one of the spring-connector Radio Shack kits. In the end, it's the same process as AM radio, but using visible light as the carrier instead of waves in the radio and microwave parts of the spectrum.

    Not everything electronic came about in the post-microprocessor era.
  • Um, dude, you are so completely wrong. Grocery store 'smart' price tags use the same RF network that their handheld inventory scanners and bar-code readers use. Ever notice that the "Scan your stuff here to see the price" box has an antenna sticking out the top?

    There is an article about these systems in the current 2600: "Secrets of Electronic Shelf Labels".

  • neat hack but..... (Score:4)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @01:02PM (#170768) Homepage
    I hae to say, pretty cool.... but anyone who has messed with this knows that I.R. works great, uses less power and will be far cheaper to impliment. Plus works when the lights are off. What about those poor blind people when the bulbs are burned out, or during a power outage? I.R. transmitters can run off of a battery for hours. plus installing them takes moments and doesn't require an electrical refit of the entire building.

    Neat, but not really useable. I give kudos for trying.
  • Hmmm...Years ago, five(ish) I read an article about using this technology in supermarkets to continuously update the electronic price tag displays on supermarket shelves. So the POS (Point of Sale) system would track the stock levels/availabilty of items and adjust the price accordingly.... Oh, I can't spell :))
  • Imagine a similar light-modulation encoding scheme where your car's current speed, vehicle ID number, and other specific information is transmitted from headlamps and taillights.

    Imagine that this encoding and transmission was required by law and monitored by police and traffic authorities. Now our cars are tattle-tales and the need for fancy radar monitoring is greatly reduced. Kinda scary thought if you don't like speeding tickets! I suppose this would be hacked eventually.

    But the same technology could also be useful for "convoy-ing" vehicles in an auto-pilot fashion. Perhaps light is not the best signal for this (radio or IR more reliable?). But wouldn't it be nice to not have to constantly tickle the accelerator and brake in stop-and-go driving? The car in front of you would tell your car that it was slowing down or speeding up, and yours could automatically adjust. Throw in a proximity detector as a failsafe and you are partway to an auto-pilot.

    Enough random thoughts for today...
    Mike
  • Well if you bothered to read the article you'd find tha answer. The idea came from him working with the new Ballast which increase the HZ rating (to reduce eye-strain) seperating it from the natural HZ of the electricity. Realizing this seperation was possible, he figured he could produce signals by flucuating this HZ.
  • ...I know somebody that is actually transmitting stuff over the ether using radio waves....

  • Suppose the lights turn red when downloading p0rn?

    "...Roxanne! You don't have to put on the red light. Those days are over. You don't have to sell your body to the night..."
  • Notice that GPS receivers have problems indoors. If there were a standard way to broadcast location information, GPS receivers could use this data when it is available.

  • Technology already in use (Score:3)

    by Cef ( 28324 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @08:34PM (#170775)

    The ILID Partnership (or what they are doing) may be what you were thinking of. They have their Indoor Light Interactive Display system, which uses the Fluorescent lighting already present in a building to transmit data to electronic shelf labels, keeping their prices accurate. They did a lot of R&D proir to the systems being made available to consumers/businesses in 1999.

    For more information, see http://www.ilid.com.au/ [ilid.com.au]

  • Now they no longer only know what you're buying, but exactly where you are, to the nearest light-fitting...

    Does that mean the slimy sales people will start showing up in person?
  • I don't get it. Why would you give a warning of a warning?
  • ..but I don't know where. When I heard about this a year or so ago, the application was in retail stores - grocery, clothing, etc. The application was to put price tags (solar powered with a cheap, efficient LCD readout, somewhat like calculator display) next to all the items and send out price updates to merchandice through the lighting system. Transmit a new price with the item's barcode and wherever the item(s) was(were) in the store, the prices would adjust accordingly. Since the e-tags (catchy name) were solar powered, they could be encased in plastic so if they were hit by a shopping cart or dropped, they wouldn't need to be replaced.

    At the time, I thought this was a great idea since it would save a stock person from having to lug around a printer and try to get the prices right. Instead, you program the barcode of the item into the electronic price tag, then put it with the merchandice, and all your stock people have to do now is go around looking at inventory.

    Anyone have some venture capital to spare?

  • What I find to be odd, is that snopes lists the claim as "false" but the text following the claim indicates that it actually did happen. What's the deal?
  • This is all well and good, until the evil guy with a flashlight and a laptop decides to send a blind person flying down the escalator without warning...
  • Prior art!! Patent it!!
  • Amen, sir/ma'am.

    However, you can block most of those types of stories from the user prefs page, if you choose.

    However, /. gets plenty slow after that :(
  • Flourecent lighting drains the life right out of me. The building in which i work is kind of neo-modernesque, with almost no 90 degree angles and NO florecent lights, anywhere. Its an office building, but we use plain old overhead lamps hanging from the celing with soft-white lightbulbs. Its plenty dark for my tastes, but the building is laid out where the sunlight comes in, indirectly, all around to provide illumination. Then most everyone has a small indirect lamp around them, somewhere.

    Its a very soothing environment in which to work. (At least, environmentally :)). Anyone else have any great ideas on how to light a workspace?

    I also take ideas on how to keep people out of my cube, and to stop them from sneaking up behind me without a complex series of mirrors.
  • I am sure many of you have heard the conspiracy theories surrounding flourescent lights....

    Many have suggested that The Man (tm) is controlling our thoughts with flourescent lights. ;)

    On a serious note though, it might be interesting to see what one could do with this technology in a covert fashion. I.e. fashion an audio/video bug self contained in a balast and install them after hours. Attach a receiver to a telescope, and you have very hard to detect surveilence.
  • I'm currently working on a system to make my wearable PC location aware inside the building here at work by placing small IR transmitters around the place. The wearable senses the signal, looks at the modulation, and launches appropriate apps for the context (ie a notetaking app comes up when I walk into the conference room). With this, it could be much easier to implement, just replace a ballast in a light in the appropriate area instead of worrying about getting power to your IR transmitter. Cool.

  • Clearly, the solution is to bolt the receiver to the top of their skulls.
  • Man, why does nobody ever remember to credit Nikola Tesla [pbs.org] with the things he invents, such as RADIO [pbs.org], AC ELECTRICAL DISTRIBUTION [pbs.org], REMOTE CONTROL [pbs.org], and, of course, the still popular (after 100 years!) fluorescent LAN! Sad thing is, it's not a conspiracy any more... he really has been forgotten.
  • I dunno. Maybe I'm just getting crabby, but these automatic "hey maybe the RIAA will outlaw this <data transmission device>" don't even rate a smile.

    Likewise all the "I'll patent breathing!" posts.

    I can't figure out whether the posters really think they're original, or just cynically fishing for mod points.
  • "Fluorescent lights are everywhere," he says. "The infrastructure is already in place."

    Sure, except for the fact that you will need to hook all your lights up to a no-doubt really expensive computer, with no-doubt really expensive software.

    That's like saying, Everyone can get DSL, look, they already have phone jacks!

    Troy
  • Now they no longer only know what you're buying, but exactly where you are, to the nearest light-fitting.

    Ingnoring your paranoia for a second, and focusing in the technical aspects of your argument:

    "They" would know better than "to the nearest light - fitting". Effective wireless networks have considerable overlap, rather than tangents where transmission radii intersect.

    Using this overlap, then, "they" could triangulate your position within much cliser than "to the nearest light fitting". Try within the nearest 2".

  • Dude, if the lights in an airport go out, they've got more to worry about than blind people finding their way around. They've got to worry about everyone else finding they way, too!!

  • Old news (sort of ...) (Score:5)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:40PM (#170792) Homepage Journal
    Where I grew up (which shall rename nameless) the local utility used tones sent thru the power mains to turn on/off things like street lights and electric hot water heaters/storage heaters during peak times (this was really low tech using reed-relays) - it was also annoying - they would come thru your stereo too.

    Anyway for a lark a friend of mine built this humungo tone generator and connected it to his house mains .... then in the wee hours of the morning used it to send morse across town .... by turning on and off all the street lights in his neighborhood ....

  • Your backside emits a controlled burst of a carbon compound called methane through a shutter called the anus. It quickly spreads around the area, where it is (hopefully) picked up by other humans with a device called a 'nose'. This nose sends signals along nerves to your brain, where the intended message is quickly decoded and the recipient yells, "d00d, wh0 f4rt3d?!?!"

    Therefore, farts are nature's PING.

  • Heh (Score:2)

    by technos ( 73414 )
    We already do this.

    Your backside emits a controlled burst of a carbon compound called methane through a shutter called the anus. It quickly spreads around the area, where it is (hopefully) picked up by other humans with a device called a 'nose'. This nose sends signals along nerves to your brain, where the intended message is quickly decoded and the recipient yells, "d00d, wh0 f4rt3d?!?!"

  • Why the handicapped? (Score:5)

    by selectspec ( 74651 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:35PM (#170795)
    Have you ever noticed that the inventor of these inventions always present some altruistic (but totally far-fetched) application for their technology? Nothing against this guy. His tech looks really cool and will have lots of applications. But, who thought up helping blind people navigate through airports?

    The design meeting:
    So what will people use this thing for?
    hmmm how about another delivery system for Bluetooth?
    ...nah.
    How about a communication alternative for the navy?
    ....mmmm no that's no good
    hmm
    How about a way to alert blind patients with Heart Diease of impending transplants availability as they walk along the mall escalator?
    BINGO!

  • It's not a warning of a warning, it's a longer warning. Traffic in cities is complex. A longer warning would be beneficial. Simply making the yellow longer would not help, because the lights would be even more inconsistant than they already are, and if you see the light is yellow and didn't see it change from green, you have no idea at all how much time is left.
  • Data sent via small carbon atoms in the air? :)

  • In a bold move, Mr Lite brite, representing Incadescent bulbs everywhere has filed suit in federal court today. "We are asking for a complete cease of data transmission through Fluorescent lights" said Mr Lite brite at a news conference this morning.

    He went on to say that "This is a new form of aparthied!, If this is allowed to continue, Incadescent lights everywhere will be swapped out prematurely from there life spans and replaced with Fluorescent lights that can transmit data as well as provide well balanced illumination for billions of people around the world. Us Incadecent bulbs will be quickly replaced and stop manufactured and we shall die out, I simply can not allow this type of genocide to continue."

    Lighting Analyst B. Franklin worries that this law suit if it prevails could set back new data services 15-20 years, GE's stock tumbled 20 points on the news as well... developing....


  • Pinging [joe.brain-dead.com] 1.1.1.1 with 32 bytes of data:

    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.

    Ping statistics for 1.1.1.1:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
    Too much natural light interfering with your packet data transmission.
  • >I'd tend to think some sort of other standard >that would let us eliminate those cursed lights >would be better.

    Actually there is ... the T5 series of flourescent lights uses a digital ballast and eliminates both the hum of current fluorescent lights and headaches associated with them. They are also much smaller, higher efficiency, and full spectrum (they worked great on my Seasonal Depression)

    Why haven't you seen any you may ask? Well .. talk to GE. Currently they are the only ones with the capacity to actually produce them. Unfortunatly, Phillips has been offering them for cheaper .. even though they don't actually know how to produce on a market scale yet and therefore aren't making them available on the market.
  • Hmm can you say piort art? :-)

  • We did this when I was a wee 'un with flashlights and the neighbour's kid, after dark.

    "...your...mo...ther...is...stan...ding...right. .. be...hind...you...you...mor...on..."

    The next step, you realise, will be coded message to international intelligence spies sent through disco lighting.


    Zaphod B
  • Not that I'm paranoid, or anything...

    This could be used as a covert method of distributing "Secret", or "Top Secret" information. (OR even "Company Classified" data.)

    Just buy a new ballast for your desk lamp, wire it (covertly) to your PC, and then make sure your light points towards a little bit to your window. Then aim a telescope at the window from another building/hill, and then hook up a PC to the telescope.

    Of course, I'm sure the government has been doing stuff like this for years for foreign agents. But if you can't bring your briefcase out of the building, then this would be an ideal way to get the data out!


    CSG_Surferdude

  • Hmmm (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:38PM (#170804) Homepage
    Somehow I don't see airports or hospitals installing special flourescent lamp networks when they could just throw together a simple radio or infrared system.
  • This was also featured on an adult targetted show, such as Beyond 2000 or NextStep. And the time frame was about the same (12 to 15 years ago). However, I can't seem to find any reference to this story on google or altavista.
  • Top of head thought time.

    Because flourescent lighting is annoying in terms of flicker and color temperature, it would be a brilliant notion to replace them with superior alternatives.

    However, to supplant flourescent lights, any solution must be superior in terms of the benefits building owners perceive: lower energy costs, and longer bulb life. Note that while pricey sockets is a damper to adoption, flourescent lighting costs a packet to install already, so over time a better solution is possible. The ideal is a matching form factor.

    So, that in mind, possible solutions include

    • Hi output led array. Long lasting, power effecient, color output tunable. Might even be able to build LED "tubes" to replace existing flourescents, but they'd have to incorporate heavy and expensive power conditioning.
    • Bioluminescence. This is a little silly, since presumably you'd need to feed the luminases, so presumably it doesn't fit into the existing grid, but if you were willing to set up a cetralized glucose feed, the cost benefit is certainly there, although I'd be surprised if you could balance the color output.
  • The next step, you realise, will be coded message to international intelligence spies sent through disco lighting.
    The study of Austin Powers will no doubt be crucial to the application of such technology.

    --

  • Damn, now where are my moderation points? That's the funniest thing I've read in the last 7.4 minutes!

  • IR networking was popular about 15 years ago. HP had a whole office LAN system that used ceiling domes to transmit to desktop machines. There were systems for retail, too. Worked OK, but the bandwidth wasn't impressive.

    One nice application for this would be in transit systems, which often already have LonWorks/Echelon networking over the power line for sign control and such. Ballasts equipped for LonWorks could retransmit to mobile units to provide destination info and such for the handicapped, retarded, or merely lost.

    Realistically, though, this sort of stuff will be done using the cell phone network and GPS. It's not worth the infrastructure investment.

  • Once the (read: any useful) technology is available to help the handicapped it'd be politically incorrect to not have it installed in all public buildings.

    Eh, I dunno. How many intersections near you are equipped with beeping crosswalk signals? There's also a system similar to this that "reads" street signs for blind people (provided that the sign is equiped with a transmitter) though I don't think it's too common except in major metropolitan areas.

    The simple problem is that there just aren't enough blind or otherwise disabled people to justify the cost of installing these sorts things everywhere. Handicapped parking and ramp access are more feasible because they're less specific to any one disability. On the other hand, areas that tend to deal with lots and lots of people (and therefore more disabled people), like airports, are more likely to adopt such a system.

    --
  • not necessarily ...

    Take Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon [cryptonomicon.com], it has several great examples of instances when you need to transfer data and normal methods either aren't available, or can't be used (ie. sending messages via a deck of cards).

    Using lamps might seem a little McGuyverish, but it certainly has it's uses.

    _f
  • Here in San Diego we just had all of our green stop lights (go-lights???) replaced with LEDs... The red were already LEDs.. I would imagine you could modulate those LED bulbs a lot faster than a flourescent.

    Hmm... That sounds like a nifty way to pass traffic data to a car... You could even tell the car "Hey, I'm about to turn yellow" thus giving the driver more information to better decide his speed...

    Now that this is public, can I use this as prior art when someone tries to patent it?
  • I can't stand the flicker of flourescent lights either. At least with computer monitors, we've had the option of getting from 60Hz (which is "good enough" for some) to 75+Hz, which is far better. Those that claim the human eye can't see past 30fps are just plain wrong.

    So, an idea I've had recently is this: why not just overclock flourescents? Running at 120Hz (a 2:1 rate) would probably make them far less annoying to most people. While there may be an energy crisis in CA, more people (like me) might consider them if they weren't so darn headache-inducing.

    Nathan Mates
  • ...theyll have both better uptime *and* better downtime than you.

  • IP over electrical lamps is boring.

    No, really. Just today the IESG has approved for publication [ietf.org] a new Informational RFC: MPLampS: Electricity over IP (with an MPLS control plane). [ietf.org]

    From the document:

    1. IP packets carry electricity in discrete, digitized form.
    2. Each packet would deliver electricity to its destination (e.g., a device with an IP address) on-demand.
    3. MPLS control will be used to switch packets within the core LDS, and in the edge premises. The architecture for this is referred to as Mostly-Pointless Lamp Switching (MPLampS).
    4. The MPLampS architectural model will accommodate both the overlay model, where the electricity consuming devices (referred to as "lamps") are operated over a distinct control plane, and the peer model, in which the lamps and the distribution network use a single control plane.
    5. RSVP-TE (RSVP with Tariff Extensions) will be used for establishing paths for electricity flow in a de-regulated environment.
    6. COPS will be used to support accounting and policy.
  • to send price data to the little LCD shelf tags.

    But it's still cool.

    John

  • Wow, gosh, I've just spent the last 15 years of my life in retail Point Of Sale just to find out that I'm wrong because of a 2600 article? Are you telling me that the nice guys in the booth at RISCON [risnews.com] (well, it's Retail Systems 2001 this year, but it used to be called RISCON) were trying to sell me equipment and lying to me about how it worked? You mean there isn't more than one way to implement a technological solution? And I can't simultaneously implement a 2.4GHz direct sequence radio network with a fluorescent light transmitter? (Actually, I probably couldn't implement NCR's RF shelf tags because they use a proprietary protocol on 2.4GHz, and I think they'd interfere with our existing 802.11 network.)

    Yes, it'd be foolish to refit all our fluorsecents when we already have an 802.11 network in place. But if we didn't already have an RF network, or plan to have one, it might be an avenue worth exploring.

    Do you work for Microsoft, by chance? You sure sound like their sales force. Keep up the "only my way" mentality and I think you have a bright future in store for you!

    John

  • Kia ora Taniwha,
    Where I grew up (which shall rename nameless) the local utility used tones sent thru the power mains to turn on/off things like street lights and electric hot water heaters/storage heaters during peak times (this was really low tech using reed-relays)

    Not sure where you grew up, but I seem to remember New Zealand using ripple-relays like the ones you mentioned in a lot of centres. Odd that ;-) They've since gone a bit higher tech, at least in the larger cities.

    On an unrelated note, is there any chance of someone sending malformed data through these lights in order to, say, trigger an epileptic seizure? I mean, fluroescent lights aren't necessarily the best on that score to start with. (Granted, IANANeurophysiologist)

  • Re:Why the handicapped? (Score:3)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:52PM (#170819) Homepage Journal
    Keep reading-- the "gentle reminder" idea was actually a pretty damn good (and suitable) one. As much as I like swapping, it's nice to see a new technology come out where the guy's first thought isn't "Hmm, how can I use this to trade music?" Read closely: it's a great application. Not suitable for replacing your corporate LAN overnight, but a perfect little niche for what he describes.
  • This was shown on an episode of "Beyond 2000" years ago, where it was used in a supermarket to change prices on little LCD pricetags on the shelves. If it got hot outside, while a few keystrokes, a grocery manager in the back could up the price of soda $.10 or whatever. And all of this was done by manipulating the fluctuation of frequency of the fluorescents in the building. Pretty cool.
  • I just feel the need to say that the Incandescent light bulb should have been banned 20 years ago.

    Sure flourescents have a flicker problem, but thats just because the USA runs on 60hz.. THERE is the problem. (Don't you think electricity would transmit more efficiently at a higher frequency?)

    If every house switched one 100 watt incandescent to one 30 watt flouro, that would save 70million watts just in the united states. (Thats 70million watts 24/7) Of course this translates into so many million tons of carbon being released into the air too!

    Oh, and another thing, we have enough power here. Otherwise we would be in black-out right this minute. We just need to stop being stupid about so many things.

    If every house built generated 100watts (say one major appliance or a water heater was required to be solar.) Well, that would actually be more than 100watts, but you get what I'm saying? It should be law that any house built must have some form of solar/renewable energy.

    We are so stupid.

  • Now heres something I can support! (Score:5)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:29PM (#170822) Homepage Journal
    I would fully support any effort by the RIAA to eliminate fluorescent lights to prevent file-sharing. It would save me the effort of looking for a ladder to remove the tubes from my office ceiling.

  • ... that engineers don't get out much. Supermarkets have been using this system for years to update their digital price tags. If you Slashdotters only left your homes once in a while you'd see them too. :^)

    - MayorQ

  • ...a project proposed when I was at university to use radio interference from network traffic on the ethernet cabling to provide a crude paging service. A remote device would listen to the interference, recognise id codes and read messages - not the actual network traffic, but the buzzes created by sending alternate blocks of data. Or something like that. I don't know if they actually got around to trying it, but I thought it was a pretty interesting idea.
  • Magnetic ballasts dim the lamp about every 1/120th of a second--the normal oscillation of alternating current--causing an imperceptible flicker. Newer electronic ballasts speed up the flicker rate to milliseconds, eliminating eyestrain and hum, two complaints long associated with fluorescents.

    1/120 second is just a bit over 8 milliseconds. "Speed[ing] up the flicker rate to milliseconds" just doesn't seem like a huge breakthrough, somehow...

    --

  • woohoo secret messages all the way, who needs a cell phone now baby? :)
  • Have a wireless broadcast only network throughout the area, and use the lights strictly for location information and downloading to the palm. It would be easy to have a master computer doing everything. Even alerting emergency prodedures to individuals.
  • Kid? Are you still online? Don't lie! I can see the light's still on!
  • Actually, the RIAA will now buy all fluorescent lights and thereby control the distribution network instead of shutting it down. There is no upstream, which is perfect for them.

  • You just program the ballast and replace the old one with it. From then on this light continuously broadcasts its short data sequence, over and over again. No network attached, no power supply, no batteries. Just a slightly more expensive electronic ballast.

    The idea is to "tag" areas and have receivers which can use the location information to give advice to the handicapped (like "you're supposed to be in the kitchen and you're not"). The technology could be used to distribute more data, but for this application it's just used as "low-res indoor GPS".

  • Re:Hmmm (Score:3)

    by YKnot ( 181580 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @01:40PM (#170831)
    Nobody's installing "special flourescent lamp networks". Only the electronic ballasts in existing lamps need to be replaced by just marginally more expensive versions which can be programmed to emit a short programmable data sequence. This way each lamp tags a certain area. The receiver uses that information to show your position on a map or whatever.

  • Re:neat hack but..... (Score:4)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @07:40PM (#170834) Journal
    I.R. works great, uses less power and will be far cheaper to impliment. Plus works when the lights are off. What about those poor blind people when the bulbs are burned out, or during a power outage?

    Oh I dunno, I don't think the blind people will mind too much if the lights are out.
  • It's data encoding/hiding of the neatest sort :)

    It's fundamentally different than IR; imagine, for example, if street lamps using this technology had localization data encoded into them?

    Of course this would only register at night, but imagine if you your car could tell what streets you were approaching? Consideing how difficult it is to read street signs at night? Or if the lamps had more intelligence, if the lamps could relay traffic conditions to the cars below? Accidents, etc?

    Or if this were hooked up to traffic lights?

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • 100 year old 4 watt Light Bulb [centennialbulb.org], party, bands, etc. Pretty good job for a piece of carbon.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • The Existing Fluorescent Light Network (Score:3)

    by Foggy Tristan ( 220356 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:34PM (#170838)
    Gee, and I though they were already being used by Space Aliens to broadcast voices into my head.

    Guess now I'll be stuck with..

    "our plans for world domination zzzz any users out there got p3rn zzzz me too zzzz jello and mayonnaise."

    Oh well, there's always aspirin.
  • The thought of messing with people via strobe light is pretty tempting.

    Also I have seen an example of something similar involving analog info via light. My physics teacher rigged a LED to a variable resistor attached to a radio. A solar panel picked up the LED's invisibly varying light and played it on a speaker. Not as useful as straight-up RF but it was pretty cool at the time.

    --

  • This isn't very practical, all of his scenarios could more easily and reliably handled with any type of transmitor. Why use a bulb? Nifty? Yes. Useful? No.

  • Application (Score:4)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:30PM (#170847) Journal
    This is great, now hookers in the red light district will have a better uptime than I.

    Strippers and Uptime. heh
  • My company just bought 60 high dollar cubicles for a new customer support office we just built. Each and every one of those cubes has built in data/phone/electric, which kinda negates the idea I'm about to espouse, but each and every one of them also has a 3' flourescent lamp and accompanying ballast.

    I've 'retrofitted' my signifcantly older cube with a $10 flourescent tube. I'm certain it wouldn't be that difficult to replace the ballast with one of those mentioned in the article.

    Can anyone say 'Lan Party'?
  • Not necessarily. You just need intelligent omni-directional receivers.

    For example, I have a network of 5 lights, each with a flourescent tube and 360degree receiver. Each tube broadcasts a packet on a tokenring like schedule. One part of the packet is instructions for passing the token, the next part of the packet is data. Wash, rinse, repeat, around the ring.

    While the article talked about broadcast applications, this style of communication would be ideal for small general purpose lans.
  • Modern electronic flourescent ballasts operate in the low kHz range already. In fact, the article even mentions that the older magnetic ballasts technically do flicker at 120Hz, since the current is alternating and they are lit during the + and - and dimmed during the zero crossing. At any rate, if you're seriously bothered by flicker, get new fixtures with electronic ballasts. They'll save even more energy, too.
  • Just FYI... the urban legends web site seems to say that this never really happened.. at least not in great quanitities.... http://www.snopes2.com/radiotv/tv/seizure.htm [snopes2.com]

  • Re:Whats Next? (Score:3)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:40PM (#170857) Journal
    If we could just harness the power of air pressure, I think we could develop a local area data network. By modulating the air pressure at different frequencies, it might be possible to transmit data at a reasonable rate.

    Dancin Santa
  • Instead of paper pricetags on the front of the shelves, each item had a small, solar-powered (plus battery backup) LCD pricetag. The tags each had a unique ID, and a receiver on the top. Price updates could be propogated through the flourescents, and the prices would automatically match what the item would scan for. They estimated the cost savings would pay for the system in less than a year.

  • Hmmm...you should read the article. (Score:3)

    by Migelikor1 ( 308578 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @03:31PM (#170862) Homepage
    Somehow I don't see airports or hospitals installing special flourescent lamp networks when they could just throw together a simple radio or infrared system.
    The point of the system, as outlined in the article, is that it's cheaper, and easier to retrofit to a building than bluetooth (or some other wireless system.) For "incrementally more" than the 20 dollar cost per lamp of upgrading to nonflicker regulators, the network can be installed. Infrared isn't terribly efficient, because it's fairly focused line of site, slow, and expensive. Overall, this sounds like a VERY good option for retrofitting older facilities with networks. The only drawback is that they're one way...
  • Great, but could these micro-bursts of light send someone into an epileptic fit, like those Japanese cartoons used to do?

    "What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
  • Wireless applications already exist, that wouldn't be crippled by line-of-light problems. If someone really wanted to provide the disabled a service, they shouldn't make it depend on having the recieving device exposed, or pointed at a light source...

  • Great... now when my company gets around to installing the microchip in the back of my neck, they'll be able to use the lighting to track how much time I spend in the can...
  • "Fluorescent lights are everywhere," he says. "The infrastructure is already in place."

    Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but there's almost no infraestructure in place. You still have to carry the data there. There is, IMHO, absolutely nothing that you can do with this idea, that you could not do better with a little infrared coded light source. I mean, what's the point? You save nothing, you have still to lie the cabling and the data infraestructure.

    Only in the case of locating devices, like in an airport, could be argued that no data is neccesary, and the info could be hard coded in the emitting bulbs. But even there the savings are not too big, and are outweighted by the problems of maintenance that you find when using a device for two completely unrelated functions. Another type of locating device could be arguably better.

    The technology to help handicapped persons to find their way around is here from a long time. The only thing needed is a common standard and a clear will, or rather the other way around. No amount of new gadgetry is going to change that basics needs.

    --

  • It is a lot more limited in range than Bluetooth. If you want a signal that only goes as far as your desk chair, you can broadcast it from the lamp under the bookshelf. If you want to use it for location purposes, you broadcast from the compact-flourescent reflector floods in the ceiling (try that with Bluetooth). Covering different parts of a room with different signals (mentioned in the link [technologyreview.com])... no problem.

    Why not use infrared? When you've already got many times the emitter power in the ceiling for room lighting, a separate IR emitter system looks like a waste of money (and electricity).
    --

  • Only problem is that it is one-way comunication.
    Okay. So's GPS. Does that make it useless? Looks to me like it makes a really useful location system and clock anyway.
    He claims that an application would be a data network on an airplane, saving the need to run miles of wire. But what would you do with such a network?
    That is perhaps the weakest suggestion, but I have an idea for that: broadcasting arrival time and gate information for connecting flights in a format easily decoded by PDA's and other units with no power or data connection to the seat.
    Here is a device that delivers a low-bandwidth (it uses ELECTRICAL WIRING, FGS), shared-medium network. A standard wireless network would provide for bandwidth overhead, would probably be cheaper (compare the range of a wireless base station to the number of flourescents in your average hospital hallway) and provide TWO-way communications.
    I don't think you get it. The power supply probably doesn't carry the data to the lamp (though you might use carrier-current to do that). The advantages are:
    1. You get a lot of transmitter power (several WATTS per tube), and you already owned the transmitters.
    2. You can arrange them in itty-bitty "cells"; each lamp can be transmitting something different, such as location codes. The limited range gives you better resolution.
    3. For applications like translations or transcriptions, you don't need two-way service; it's overkill.
    4. A receiver that can pick the signal out of the fluorescent emissions can be ultra-low power (the multi-watt transmitter does the work) and dirt cheap.
    While it's nice that they have a device that will help Tommy Braindamage find his way to an appointment, shouldn't someone be keeping closer tabs on Tommy if he is this brain damaged?
    Maybe Tommy B. needs to exercise the parts of his brain that are still working, and that exercise is part of his recovery program. Reminding him that he's supposed to be someplace soon and telling him how to get there gives him more exercise than a chaperone. If he goes out of the rehab unit, you can always have an el-cheapo car-alarm transmitter alert the staff to go pick him up (runs on two button cells and costs a few bucks, already has the spectrum allocated by the FCC).

    And who cares if it's not a commercial success? It's fun and thought-provoking.
    --

  • Oh No! (Score:4)

    by Reckless Visionary ( 323969 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:30PM (#170875)
    Now the lights are talking! I can see the music, man. . .

  • Here in brazil it's obrigatory to keep prices updated in the shelves in the supermakets. We have two choices, or we keep it updated, or we come back to ye-old-price-label on each product.

    Of course supermarkets won't come back to price-labels. So, they tryied many different solutions. One of the solution is use fluorescent lamp flicker to send data to digital price-informers in the shelves.

    I have never seen any kind of thing like this working before. But it's really a nice idea.

    Imagine, you pick the product from the shelf thinking that it costs $1.00, and by the time you pay it, it's $1.20!!!


    Don't worry, I'm to bored [to|every]day

  • Multi-threaded String LANs on the Way (Score:5)

    by Magumbo ( 414471 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2001 @12:56PM (#170877)
    Data hidden in the vibration of strings may help the disabled lead independent lives.

    The vibration of a string, long a symbol associated with guitars, violins, and other stringed instruments, may give new freedom to the handicapped, thanks to a low-tech startup that sees the strings as the perfect transmitters.

    Talking Strings, a Cambridge-based MIT spinoff, is developing a local area network that uses fluctuations in thin strands of thread to transmit data. Inventor, company founder and MIT professor Steven Dweeb predicts the technology will be a boon for the disabled.

    For example, he says, shoe strings could direct a blind person carrying a special receiver-worn as a badge or held like a PDA-to the correct gate. Thick metal "round wound" bass strings attached to a person's eardrum could broadcast enhanced audio to the hearing disabled, or transcriptions to the deaf. And research published this month suggests that the technology could greatly improve the rehabilitation of persons with traumatic brain injury.

    Hallelujah

    In his MIT laboratory, Dweeb recently demonstrated his invention. First, he pulled out a 2 foot strand of waxed mint dental floss. "See?" he asked. "A normal piece of floss. You probably have some in your bathroom."

    Next, he picked up his receiver--a black coffee can with a small hole poked in the end. From a few feet away, he tightened the string and plucked it. Twangy music blared from the can. Tinny, but clear, came the familiar chorus from Handel's Messiah.

    --

  • But Mom, I can only do this work at night - no, I'm not doing an caffeine-fueled all-nighter for the hell of it - DON'T TURN THAT LIGHT OFF I'M IN THE MIDDLE OF A SAVNo route to host - connection closed.
    Still fun as an idea, though =)

    43rd Law of Computing:
  • ...It would be easy to have a master computer doing everything. Even alerting emergency prodedures to individuals.

    What, you mean like .NET? =)
    Now they no longer only know what you're buying, but exactly where you are, to the nearest light-fitting...

    43rd Law of Computing:

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