VLC Lab

Our work around the fifth assignment of Dr. Mangold's Wireless Networking and Mobile Computing 2021 at ETH Zürich.

This project attempts to demonstrate Visible Light Communication (VLC)¹² by implementing a simple two-way chat app. LED-equipped Arduinos Uno (flashed with an ETH driver program) serve as transceivers and are controlled by a Python script. The chat app ("VLChat") is accompanied by a stat collection program ("VLCollect") for further analysis. The notebook Findings.ipynb dives deeper into the topic.

Path to the first execution

To install all dependecies, run make. (This assumes that your PIP version is installed as pip in /bin.)

To execute the code in ./vlchat/__main__.py, for instance, run sudo python3 vlchat or the equivalent command on your machine. Administrator privileges are required for the interactive CLI only.

Footnotes

1. Dietz P., Yerazunis W., Leigh D. (2003) Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs. In: Dey A.K., Schmidt A., McCarthy J.F. (eds) UbiComp 2003: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2864. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-39653-6_14 ↩

2. S. Schmid, D. Schwyn, K. Akşit, G. Corbellini, T. R. Gross and S. Mangold, "From sound to sight: Using audio processing to enable visible light communication," 2014 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps), 2014, pp. 518-523, doi: 10.1109/GLOCOMW.2014.7063484. ↩