Coming soon..

Okay, contrary to popular perception that I perished in 'The Pool', I am very much alive and have been unable to blog due to hectic study schedules, general laziness, and a one and a half week viral fever (presumably contracted from the water I greedily gulped down while I was drowning in 'The Pool'). The third reason (Grr..) wrecked up my last and best prepared-for paper, which was today morning. Wracked with weakness and stuff during the examination.. took lot more time to solve even simple problems. Anyhow, I'm not going to mope about stupid stuff like that on the blog.

The post is entitled "Coming soon..", so let me justify it. This is intended as an annoucement of the forthcoming series of posts called "Interesting Projects". Sorry, can't think of a better name. You may wonder why I'm announcing this thing a second time, since I've already done that in my previous post. There are two reaons, a technical reason, and the second, a tad bit smarter. Technical but stupid reason, I just mentioned in the previous post that I had 'planned' to start something of this sort, not actually concretely decided anything. :-) The other reason is because I wish to tell you a bit about what my first "Interesting Projects" post is going to be and how it works. Don't say "awww". This is not a thriller movie. The interesting project I'm working on right now is making my own simple Wireless LAN connection between computers, from scratch. I'm not making it using any existing standards, nor am I using any device or ready-made stuff. I'm figuring out the hardware circuits, software and the logic. Loads of fun..

I'm not targetting efficiency or stuff like that, and since my first baby-step is intended to be a basic chat-program between two systems, I am going to use my favorite code: Morse Code. :-) I've already developed the software to encode and decode. Concept is simple:

"The person types a message in plain English, then the encoder first converts it into a modified Morse code I've devised, and then it sends through the Parallel Port (Printer port) a signal to the transmitting circuit I'm building. If an on-signal is sent to two pins in the port, then the circuit generates a high-frequency wave, and if its a one pin signal, then it generate a low frequency wave, each of the same time duration.

(Side Note: This is, in my opinion, better for computers since this way it can send all alphabets at nearly the same speed, and computers can differenciate between frequencies very well. Common way is to send a short pulse for a 'dit' and a long one for a 'dah'. This takes longer due to obvious reasons)

Now these waves are transmitted wirelessly, caught by the reciever circuit which works exactly the reverse way, and the computer will show the decoded English message."

:-) Very elementary, but I intend to chuck Morse code and start becoming a bit more ambitious by transmitting in 8-bit ASCII later. The hardware is still a little buggy. I'll post the final circuit diagrams later. Again, I assure you nothing's going to be too technical. I'll mark the paragraphs that are going to technical so that you can skip them. :-)