modBulb : a modular light bulb for visible light communication

Due to several interesting properties such as large bandwidth and immunity against radio interference, Visible Light Communication (VLC) has caught the attention of the research community. Current efforts are, however, hampered by the lack of open source platforms. We present modBulb, an open, modular light bulb. modBulb is a VLC transmitter that can be customized to the application's requirements. modBulb enables modulation and other processing through an MCU for flexibility and ease of programming or an FPGA for applications that require higher efficiency. Furthermore, modBulb supports several driving circuits to balance the trade-off between energy efficiency and switching noise. Last but not least, the light source itself can be selected according to the application's requirements. We present experiments that demonstrate modBulb's salient properties.