Wait, is Wi-Fi just blinking lights?
Wi-Fi, the mysterious computer blabber. Have you ever wondered how are computers yapping away from under our noses? What secrets must they hold? In this talk we will cover the magic of Wi-Fi, how it works in detail and we will even get our own wireless communication system going using Python and micro-controllers.
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I want a ticket!Wi-Fi systems are complicated beasts with several layers, each solving a little piece of the overall wireless communication puzzle.
At the most basic level, there are radio frequency transmitters and receivers. Transmitters are little lights that can be turned on and off at several different colors and intensities, but with frequencies so low our eyes can't see. Conversely, receivers are just little 360° cameras, that like our eyes can only see a small spectrum of colors, but again in colors we can't see.
On top of that, if two computers want to communicate they must plot and agree upon a common scheme for how to blink their own lights, and how to change their colors and intensities so that they know what each other mean when they see specific light patterns. This is not unlike Morse code, but using more ways of conveying information other than just short and long blinks.
Even though that forms the basis of being able to communicate, there are still several other layers on top, since the scheming computers must also agree on things such as to when to turn off their transmitters so their cameras are not blinded by their own lights as they are trying to listen to their peers, how to identify to whom the messages are going if there are multiple peers, how to secretly encode messages such that only peers in the same network can see it, and how to deliver messages from and to the Internet.
Using Python and RP2040 microcontrollers, we can build little lights and cameras and implement a fully working version of a wireless communication system, with the extra benefit we can actually watch the lights and see what it looks like when computers are talking.
I am a curious individual who happens to be a programmer. My interest in computers actually started with microcontrollers and the digital design of processors, but once I figured dealing with hardware was expensive I decided to focus on software, only to find myself drawn back to it. I have done a lot of things throughout the years: wireless communication protocols, raytracing, games and game engines, art, cryptography, classical simulation of quantum processes and a lot more. At present I design and run experiments for validating Wi-Fi chips under real world conditions.