Light project

VLC – Visible Light Communication, a method of communicating using waves from the visible spectrum (390 – 700nm) by changing the light intensity of an LED light at high enough rates so the human eye cannot register any change but a photo-receiver will, this way the light seems perfectly normal although it carries information in it.
This method of communication is somewhat a novel way to solve some problems that arise with radio-wave based communication.
The visible light spectrum is wide and free to use and the light itself is inherently safe in oppose to the radio wave spectrum which is narrow (unused frequencies are getting scarce and expensive), long exposures can cause ill effects on the human body and radio waves are less secure as it is hard to contain them.

This project is built of two parts, a transmitter and a receiver.

The transmitter unit consists of a simple switch circuit with a LED light connected to a micro-controller (Arduino Uno) which modulates the data and drives the LED light in high frequencies thus encapsulate data inside the light emitted by the LED.

The receiver unit can be any Android based smart-phone with an embedded camera that is using the designated receiver application. The app records the slight changes in the LED light then using image processing analysis to define each frame as a binary 1/0 depends on the light's status, after which the data stream is demodulated and coded back to ASCII so the data could be displayed on screen.