Inspiration
We wanted to make an app that would enable people to communicate over a long distance without having a wireless internet or cellular connection. The idea we ended up settling on was to use light itself to communicate: using changing light patterns to send a message from one person to the other.
How it works
Two python scripts running on two computers communicate by flashes of colored light. One computer takes a message, encodes it using Reed-Solomon error-correction codes, and then translates the bits of that code into color patterns. The other computer uses OpenCV to detect the changing color patterns and translate them back into the message sent.
Challenges I ran into
We originally wanted to make this app for Android devices, but ran into issues with the fact that many Android phones do not allow you to control the camera frame rate, which was necessary to accurately transmit information.
What I learned
Hardware sucks sometimes.
What's next for FlashChat
FlashChat could have a lot of applications in real life should we succeed in our original plan of communicating using phones and light. We hope to keep going, and explore the possibilities the technology might open for ourselves and others.
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