http://www.t8o.org/~mca1001/papers/laser-align1.about.html

Protocol for self-alignment of laser-through-air ethernet links

Content is copyright © 2002 Matthew Astley

$Id: laser-align1.about.html,v 1.3 2002/09/28 02:25:30 mca1001 Exp $

My comments on the paper

It seemed necessary to publish some other information about this paper to supplement or explain it. Oh, and to mention again that the paper is not finished yet. Sorry about that. One day. I always have other things to do.

This page was sparked by Derek Weston's comment on the paper - it doesn't seem very clever for me to hand out hyperlinks to an ever-changing to-do list.

Random thoughts

The neighbour problem

As it stands, you can't easily use a RONJA-type system to talk to someone three doors down on the same side of the street. My suggested solution to this is to (get permission to) attach a small, slightly convex mirror to the front of one of the houses opposite.

This doesn't seem like a lot to ask - certainly it is less than having some weird electronic thing sitting there using electricity and taking space, and it shouldn't need servicing very often.

In order to hit your friend down the street you're going to need much finer control of the beam, but apart from that everything should continue just as normal!

References and links from the paper

Copies of some of the references, since their hyperlinks are probably more useful in this form: Of course copying things makes them go out of date and fall out of sync with each other. This is considered normal by programmers.