Building a Ronja-lightlink

Skip to Navigation »

Any information on this page may be outdated or otherwise inaccurate. Links may be broken. It stays here for historical reasons.

Content

Why this article?

In the summer of the year 2002, we thought about a possibility to connect us together. Because the distance is very long (about 750 meters), a cable was no solution. Another thing was wavelan, but it would be dear and not really secure. Also there was no guarantee that it will work.

We’ve tried to connect with wavelan between my Apple Powerbook and my colleagues D-Link Internet Gateway, but unfortunately there was no success. So we had to rethink what we want to do further and I remembered about the Ronja-project.

Around February 2002 I’ve heard from a project called Ronja. First I tought this is a joke, but after reading through the documentation, it looked very fantastic.

In the November of 2002, we definitly decided to try to build a Ronja-link.

And finally this article is to achieve our experience for others.

Involved persons

Roman Zürcher

info-at-zue-dot-ch

Michael Hanselmann

Writter of this article. Contact.

What is Ronja?

Ronja is a system using LEDs and photodiodes to transmit data over a distance up to 1.4 km.

Buying the material

The first problem we had was: where to buy these not-very-common-here LEDs? After searching across the internet, I ordered them via the internet in a shop in Germay.

Then we had a break because of other important things for 4 months, but in the April 2003 we restarted everything and begun to plan more.

Because we weren’t able to get some lenses with a diameter of 130 mm in Switzerland, we had to buy them from the initators of the project.

On 1st of May, we bought the electronical material from a electronic-shop in a city near us and started building.

Building

After sorting everything we split the work on the basis of our experience. Roman started building the pipe while I begun to solder the electronics.

Currently I’m soldering the AUI-converter while Roman is continuing building the pipes.

Additional pictures, 2003-09-25

We currently don’t have much time to continue building, sorry. Some new pictures:

Update on 2004-10-31

Due to time constraints, we weren’t able to continue our work for over a year now. Because of that and because we’re in our last year of our apprenticeship, we decided to shut down the project until next summer.

Update May 2007

After starting over using PCB’s last year, I ran out of time again. Due to this and other reasons, I sold all PCB’s and lenses in April 2007.

License of this article

Copyright © 2003 Michael Hanselmann.
Copyright © 2003 Roman Zürcher.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.