6 ms·

Ronja: Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access

92 points by marcodiego 5y ago

emteycz 5y ago
My father once brought this device home. I saw computers using it pinging, but having a look at the hardware was awesome in its own way (I was around 6, 7?). Very sophisticated and at the same time simple.
ghostly_s 5y ago
What the hell is going on here? http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembled_stereo0.jpg http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembl... why wouldn't you use a pcb for something like this?
- BostonEnginerd 5y ago
  This project predates easy and cheap PCB creation.
  - alar44 5y ago
    No it doesn't. It's been possible to make homemade PCBs for decades. Even then, they could have at least used perfboard. No idea why someone would want to do it that way. That was fine for the 1920s, but there's no excuse for such poor construction these days.
    - aliswe 5y ago
      from the website: > Things have been made much easier by putting the most complicated electronics on a PCB. maybe it looks like this nowadays? http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm
    - okl 5y ago
      To the contrary. That is how hams wire up their circuits when using throughhole components. Look here: https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
      - alar44 5y ago
        Some do, but it's stupid. There's no reason to do it that way other than laziness. And even that's the wrong word as that's much more difficult than using a board.
        buescher 5y ago
        You don't get a ground plane with perfboard, unless you submit yourself to the pain of working with vectorboard, and perfboard construction is inherently more fragile than dead bug. If you get good at dead bug construction, you can make changes and do experiments as easily as with a solderless breadboard.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - rasz 5y ago
      This is running at RF frequencies, no you cant use perf board for that.
- obnauticus 5y ago
  Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. It’s definitely a legacy thing but still quite common for hobbyist projects. It’s quite suitable for specific RF situations provided you have done the right characterization work. https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists-can-break-through-the-highfrequency-barrier https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists... https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    Why does it look the way it does though? Even without a PCB, this could be neater.
    - buescher 5y ago
      It looks the way it does because: 1) First and foremost, the board or box the components are soldered to forms a very good ground plane 2) The parts are organized so that the circuits fit the enclosure 3) The part leads are used to provide relatively rigid support for the parts 4) Where they can't, it looks like the builder used epoxy You could argue that the builder should have cleaned off the solder flux and you'd probably be wrong, because you probably don't know what a pain it is to really clean off solder flux to the standards of high reliability circuits. Folks that are used to breadboards and perfboard construction have a hard time appreciating the care that goes into good dead-bug assembly. That is probably a fairly high performance circuit and is probably much more rugged than the typical perfboard sewing card.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    > Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. How ironic, given the website also does not support HTTPS.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Initial RONJA prototypes and versions ware built before the time of cheap chinese pcb fabs. They would have likely had to pay between 150 and 500eur per pcb round. We live in such nice times these days for electronics design that even hobbyists can afford multiple prototype rounds with assembly. Now if the silicon shortage would just go away...
- lucasvo 5y ago
  It makes me happy and sentimental to see this post show up on hackernews. I was a contributor to the Ronja project in my teens. Karel (`clock`) taught me so much about open source and truly believed in pushing open technology forward. I was 14 at the time and he just finished university and taught me a ton mostly late at nights on the swiss linux user group's IRC channels. A lot of the replies point out that cheap PCBs were not readily accessible. Clock and I were both living in Switzerland and prototyping PCBs especially in Switzerland was very costly. This kept us away from developing PCBs for a while. We did want to build a 100mbit version and that was significantly easier using SMD components and a multilayer PCB so we started working on that. When we had the first prototype I actually took a train to Prague when I was 14 years old and went to a PCB fab to pick up 50 or so along with all the parts. This saved us a few thousand dollars and we tried to recoup the cost by selling kits. Fun times :) The philosophy of the project was also to build it only with open source projects (something that wasn't feasible for the PCB design - we used Eagle which at least was free to use). The dead bug style worked very well and was extremely simple but of course not aesthetically pleasing when compared to what you can order online today. But it also meant that you could build it yourself without the need to order a PCB. We used a local community run welding shop to build some of steel mounts: http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html
terinjokes 5y ago
As someone who recently started looking into free space optics for communication, seeing this suddenly pop up here is a bit surprising! This is the project I pointed at when my friends asked if you could do fast communications with visible light. The project has cataloged several installations (http://ronja.twibright.com/installations.php http://ronja.twibright.com/installations.php) but I suspect there's many more that haven't been registered. I'm curious if any of these systems are still in place.
- NavinF 5y ago
  Doubt it. This site hasn’t changed since I saw it over 10 years ago
  - myself248 5y ago
    Yeah, doesn't this need like a (1973) in the title or something? 'Tis ancient.
  - terinjokes 5y ago
    The latest addition to the list is 2010, so it's conceivable one is still installed somewhere.
RicoElectrico 5y ago
With some basic SERDES knowledge I wonder what could be done in 2022, now that we have cheap FPGAs. Ronja is limited in that it piggybacks on 10BASE-T Ethernet, which in turn makes in simpler. It wouldn't be easy to analogously piggyback on 100BASE-T due to PAM-3 transmission. An FPGA would allow for a bespoke PHY/MAC to be implemented in lieu of Ethernet. There are many techniques for pushing bits into a wire faster, like CTLE, DFE, pre-emphasis, to name a few. Probably the best starting point would be Behzad Razavi's "Design of Integrated Circuits For Optical Communications". For starters, the LED driver could use current switching with some idle current (pre-bias) in "0" state to achieve more bandwidth.
- wolrah 5y ago
  As I see it, RONJA's nature as a hack of ethernet was one of its benefits, it could be integrated with ordinary ethernet gear. I think if one was to try to develop a followup, basing it on one of the fiber variants of ethernet seems natural enough considering the idea is more or less fiber without the fiber. In theory up to 25G ethernet could be attempted with something like this, anything bigger than that uses multiple lanes or multilevel encoding, but obviously in the real world the practical limit for something that could be built at a DIY level is maybe gigabit realm.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Yep. Could see a low cost FPGA with a being used for a new, more advanced ome with better linecoding, FEC and DSP on the receive side. And all that cheaper than the original RONJA was back in the day.
- Kliment 5y ago
  The modern version of this is http://www.koruza.net/features/ http://www.koruza.net/features/ which piggybacks on fiber transceivers.
zajio1am 5y ago
We built and used several ones. Much better than 802.11b wifi links in 2.4 GHz, but finicky, pain to align, horrible mechanical design, requires super-stable mast, prone to bad weather, and also stopped to work during dawn/sunset, if the link was aligned with sun :-). We mostly abandoned them when 802.11a wifi links in 5 Ghz came. Later, we bought some 100Mbps professional FSOs (free space optics) that were much better than Ronja, but still more problematic than radios.
- aj7 5y ago
  Can’t imagine a use case. I’m sure they exist. But I’ll bet I could count them on fingers and toes. And anything truly practical would require active stabilization of the aiming.
  - cshimmin 5y ago
    Seems like it could be useful for radio-sensitive instrumentation, such as a GHz telescope array.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    Only if you have a tectonic plate fault line running through the middle of your city
  - zajio1am 5y ago
    Small non-profit wireless ISP. In early 2000s, when only affordable alternative was 2.4 GHz wifi, which was already heavily congested and have low throughtput and 100ms latencies under load due to collisions and retransmissions, the 10 Mbps full-duplex optical link with low latencies and immunity to interference (outside of sun :-) ) is pretty good deal.
amelius 5y ago
What class laser source does it need?
- dfox 5y ago
  It uses mid-power LED originally intented for automotive brake lights (when it was designed the LED used probably was considered "high-power").

92 points by marcodiego 5y ago

My father once brought this device home. I saw computers using it pinging, but having a look at the hardware was awesome in its own way (I was around 6, 7?). Very sophisticated and at the same time simple.

ghostly_s 5y ago

What the hell is going on here? http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembled_stereo0.jpg http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembl... why wouldn't you use a pcb for something like this?

BostonEnginerd 5y ago
This project predates easy and cheap PCB creation.
- alar44 5y ago
  No it doesn't. It's been possible to make homemade PCBs for decades. Even then, they could have at least used perfboard. No idea why someone would want to do it that way. That was fine for the 1920s, but there's no excuse for such poor construction these days.
  - aliswe 5y ago
    from the website: > Things have been made much easier by putting the most complicated electronics on a PCB. maybe it looks like this nowadays? http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm
  - okl 5y ago
    To the contrary. That is how hams wire up their circuits when using throughhole components. Look here: https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
    - alar44 5y ago
      Some do, but it's stupid. There's no reason to do it that way other than laziness. And even that's the wrong word as that's much more difficult than using a board.
      - buescher 5y ago
        You don't get a ground plane with perfboard, unless you submit yourself to the pain of working with vectorboard, and perfboard construction is inherently more fragile than dead bug. If you get good at dead bug construction, you can make changes and do experiments as easily as with a solderless breadboard.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - rasz 5y ago
    This is running at RF frequencies, no you cant use perf board for that.
obnauticus 5y ago
Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. It’s definitely a legacy thing but still quite common for hobbyist projects. It’s quite suitable for specific RF situations provided you have done the right characterization work. https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists-can-break-through-the-highfrequency-barrier https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists... https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Why does it look the way it does though? Even without a PCB, this could be neater.
  - buescher 5y ago
    It looks the way it does because: 1) First and foremost, the board or box the components are soldered to forms a very good ground plane 2) The parts are organized so that the circuits fit the enclosure 3) The part leads are used to provide relatively rigid support for the parts 4) Where they can't, it looks like the builder used epoxy You could argue that the builder should have cleaned off the solder flux and you'd probably be wrong, because you probably don't know what a pain it is to really clean off solder flux to the standards of high reliability circuits. Folks that are used to breadboards and perfboard construction have a hard time appreciating the care that goes into good dead-bug assembly. That is probably a fairly high performance circuit and is probably much more rugged than the typical perfboard sewing card.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  > Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. How ironic, given the website also does not support HTTPS.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RF_Savage 5y ago
Initial RONJA prototypes and versions ware built before the time of cheap chinese pcb fabs. They would have likely had to pay between 150 and 500eur per pcb round. We live in such nice times these days for electronics design that even hobbyists can afford multiple prototype rounds with assembly. Now if the silicon shortage would just go away...
lucasvo 5y ago
It makes me happy and sentimental to see this post show up on hackernews. I was a contributor to the Ronja project in my teens. Karel (`clock`) taught me so much about open source and truly believed in pushing open technology forward. I was 14 at the time and he just finished university and taught me a ton mostly late at nights on the swiss linux user group's IRC channels. A lot of the replies point out that cheap PCBs were not readily accessible. Clock and I were both living in Switzerland and prototyping PCBs especially in Switzerland was very costly. This kept us away from developing PCBs for a while. We did want to build a 100mbit version and that was significantly easier using SMD components and a multilayer PCB so we started working on that. When we had the first prototype I actually took a train to Prague when I was 14 years old and went to a PCB fab to pick up 50 or so along with all the parts. This saved us a few thousand dollars and we tried to recoup the cost by selling kits. Fun times :) The philosophy of the project was also to build it only with open source projects (something that wasn't feasible for the PCB design - we used Eagle which at least was free to use). The dead bug style worked very well and was extremely simple but of course not aesthetically pleasing when compared to what you can order online today. But it also meant that you could build it yourself without the need to order a PCB. We used a local community run welding shop to build some of steel mounts: http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html

terinjokes 5y ago

As someone who recently started looking into free space optics for communication, seeing this suddenly pop up here is a bit surprising! This is the project I pointed at when my friends asked if you could do fast communications with visible light. The project has cataloged several installations (http://ronja.twibright.com/installations.php http://ronja.twibright.com/installations.php) but I suspect there's many more that haven't been registered. I'm curious if any of these systems are still in place.

NavinF 5y ago
Doubt it. This site hasn’t changed since I saw it over 10 years ago
- myself248 5y ago
  Yeah, doesn't this need like a (1973) in the title or something? 'Tis ancient.
- terinjokes 5y ago
  The latest addition to the list is 2010, so it's conceivable one is still installed somewhere.

RicoElectrico 5y ago

With some basic SERDES knowledge I wonder what could be done in 2022, now that we have cheap FPGAs. Ronja is limited in that it piggybacks on 10BASE-T Ethernet, which in turn makes in simpler. It wouldn't be easy to analogously piggyback on 100BASE-T due to PAM-3 transmission. An FPGA would allow for a bespoke PHY/MAC to be implemented in lieu of Ethernet. There are many techniques for pushing bits into a wire faster, like CTLE, DFE, pre-emphasis, to name a few. Probably the best starting point would be Behzad Razavi's "Design of Integrated Circuits For Optical Communications". For starters, the LED driver could use current switching with some idle current (pre-bias) in "0" state to achieve more bandwidth.

wolrah 5y ago
As I see it, RONJA's nature as a hack of ethernet was one of its benefits, it could be integrated with ordinary ethernet gear. I think if one was to try to develop a followup, basing it on one of the fiber variants of ethernet seems natural enough considering the idea is more or less fiber without the fiber. In theory up to 25G ethernet could be attempted with something like this, anything bigger than that uses multiple lanes or multilevel encoding, but obviously in the real world the practical limit for something that could be built at a DIY level is maybe gigabit realm.
RF_Savage 5y ago
Yep. Could see a low cost FPGA with a being used for a new, more advanced ome with better linecoding, FEC and DSP on the receive side. And all that cheaper than the original RONJA was back in the day.
Kliment 5y ago
The modern version of this is http://www.koruza.net/features/ http://www.koruza.net/features/ which piggybacks on fiber transceivers.

zajio1am 5y ago

We built and used several ones. Much better than 802.11b wifi links in 2.4 GHz, but finicky, pain to align, horrible mechanical design, requires super-stable mast, prone to bad weather, and also stopped to work during dawn/sunset, if the link was aligned with sun :-). We mostly abandoned them when 802.11a wifi links in 5 Ghz came. Later, we bought some 100Mbps professional FSOs (free space optics) that were much better than Ronja, but still more problematic than radios.

aj7 5y ago
Can’t imagine a use case. I’m sure they exist. But I’ll bet I could count them on fingers and toes. And anything truly practical would require active stabilization of the aiming.
- cshimmin 5y ago
  Seems like it could be useful for radio-sensitive instrumentation, such as a GHz telescope array.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Only if you have a tectonic plate fault line running through the middle of your city
- zajio1am 5y ago
  Small non-profit wireless ISP. In early 2000s, when only affordable alternative was 2.4 GHz wifi, which was already heavily congested and have low throughtput and 100ms latencies under load due to collisions and retransmissions, the 10 Mbps full-duplex optical link with low latencies and immunity to interference (outside of sun :-) ) is pretty good deal.

amelius 5y ago

What class laser source does it need?

dfox 5y ago
It uses mid-power LED originally intented for automotive brake lights (when it was designed the LED used probably was considered "high-power").