Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #06838



To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.comBR
From: "Chris Smail" smail@canadawired.comBR
Date: Sun, Oct 17, 1999, 10:49 PM

Subject: Re: Stupid mistake







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6839 Mon, 18 Oct 1999 14:42:54 +1000 [alt-beam] Re: Radio Communications? beam@sgiblab.sgi.com Elmo
Hmmm...Interesting thread....

I work at a company called "The ILID Partnership". We make Electronic
Shelf Labels that replace paper labels that display the price of goods
in supermarkets (www.ilid.com.au if your interested)

The funky thing about our labels is they get their data from modulated
light. We modulate our data onto the mains power and that oscillates the
lights in a building enough that our labels can pick up the flicker
(even though you cant see it) and they turn it back into data for
display information.

Why am i telling you this....

Well for starters our labels use the solar robotics type 1/8" cell for
its optical receiver. They work in extremely low lux levels (details are
proprietary, but its very low), and over long distances away from any
modulated transmission source. The circuit is made in SMT components and
takes up less than 10mm x 10mm, and costs less than about $5(Aus) in
components. The labels have a 4 bit micro (which can also generate
sounds but we dont use that bit).

As soon as i have something worthy of doing it to i intend to integrate
the guts of one of these labels onto a bot along with an LED for
transmitting, so that i can A) program information into by bots on the
fly using the buildings lights and B) so that they can talk to each
other using the LED to Tx and the 1/8" cell to Rx. I hope that this will
also mean that when they are talking to each other they will try to face
each other (the brightest light source in the area)

My hope is to try to make a group of robots that can talk to each other,
but mainly so that each robot can work out if there is another robot
nearby so that i can try some flocking algorithms with them.


Elmo out

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