Lazer haxors

Inspiration

The cool projects that people at MIT did back in the days.

What it does

On the sender, we used a red laser to encode information using pulses of light. On the receiving end, we used a photoresitor to read the intensity of the light and decode the signal.

How we built it

We started by sending single bits using the laser pointer and two Arduinos on a breadboard. We tried using infrared leds, which didn't work. It also took some time to get the transistor used to control the laser work. Finally, we moved the sending portion to the ESP8266, allowing us to send data over wifi.

Challenges we ran into

We found synchronization of our sending and receiving units to be extremely difficult. It was hard for us to send some calibration data between the sender and receiver and adjust the timings so that both the sender and receiver are ready to send and receive data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Much of the coding/breadboarding tasks relating to Arduinos were extremely difficult to parallelize due to limited equipment. As a result, all three members worked collaboratively on all aspects of this project which we are proud of.

In addition, as all three team members are studying software in school and have limited experience working with hardware, we're extremely proud of the fact that we able to finish the hack and able to send characters using a laser.

What we learned

-How to use esp8266 WiFi module -Debugging skills in both hardware and software -We became more familiar with the Arduino platform, and Arthur used Arduinos for the first time