Demonstration Abstract: Research Platform for Visible Light Communication and Sensing Systems

Abstract

OpenVLC (\url{www.openvlc.org}) is an open-source project for research in Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems. It has the potential to help create a new type of infrastructure, an Internet of Lights (IoL), where LED-based devices (e.g., car lights, city lights, billboards, toy, etc) and photodetectors become inter-connected. OpenVLC is built upon an embedded platform and adopts off-the-shelf optical devices and essential electronic components. It has been proved to be a starter kit for VLC research, thanks to its deployments by tens of top universities/research centers in the world (\url{www.openvlc.org/list-of-users.html}). This demo introduces its latest version: OpenVLC1.1. The new features include: (1) higher resilience to ambient light noise, e.g., indoor interfering lighting; (2) interface for sensor application. A new board (OpenVLC1.1 cape) is designed and the printed circuit is developed. The cape is plugged directly into the main embedded board and external sensors can be easily connected to the cape. This demo demonstrates OpenVLC1.1's networking performance through standard networking diagnostic tools and shows an application wherein temperature and humidity sensed data are transmitted through VLC links.