I recently returned from my private island in the Maldives. Like most of the inhabited islands, it has no physical links to other islands at all. It is only about 250 meters in diameter, so there isn’t much room for infrastructure. The island has its own desalination plant for water, an incinerator for waste disposal, a diesel generator for power, and daily boat shipments for food and supplies, including barrels of fuel for the generator. All telephone and internet connections are via satellite and radio, courtesy of a small tower in the center of the island. The tower needn’t be very tall, because there aren’t many structures over 10 meters in the middle of the Indian Ocean, as we are, and the next cell tower isn’t typically more than 20-30 miles away.

So the topic of this post is getting rid of physical links in rigs: wireless technology. Here are some quick ways to decrease the number of cables on your rig, including some custom solutions.

Wireless keyboard and mouse

An obvious place to start, there are many options. I prefer ones with batteries for two reasons: (1) charging cradles often fail to reliably make good electrical contact with the battery connectors, and (2) there is no emergency solution when the battery goes down to zero. By the way, for cases where I don’t need to do much typing at a computer– just enter a few commands once in a while– I like the small, Bluetooth Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboards for reducing clutter around the rig.

Monitor connection

WiDi isn’t quite prime time yet. But it’s available in some laptops. Hopefully there will be solutions for desktop computers soon. Wireless HDMI is another option to look at as well.

Network connection

If there isn’t a need to move large amounts of data to and from the net, then just put a wireless card in the computer and get rid of that cable.

Custom electronics

It’s never been easier to make your own wireless connections for your custom electronics. Here are some platforms to consider:

ZigBee/XBee

SparkFun, Adafruit, and other companies sell inexpensive kits and Arduino shields for the ZigBee specification. This is an RF-based (2.4 GHz), open protocol. Since it’s a mesh architecture, it’s perfect for implementations with several units, for example, a whole room full of behavior boxes.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is the more widely known, and perhaps slightly more expensive, PAN. Again, many companies sell kits for it (e.g., SparkFun). Again, it is a 2.4 GHz RF-based protocol. It can be useful because many laptops, and even some desktop computer, already have Bluetooth modems installed, thus simplifying the implementation.

Nordic

The strength of Nordic’s system is ultra low power usage. It’s less popular for custom electronics than the two other RF-based solutions I mentioned above, but there are still kits available (e.g., SparkFun).

Infrared

For applications which might be sensitive to RF radiation, infrared wireless communication is a nice option. It’s basically line of sight, of course, so it’s more limited than RF, but it won’t interfere with most instrumentation. Even most imaging rigs should be fine around it. IRDA specifications are the most standard ones. However, if you don’t have a lot of data to transmit, and just want to send some simple commands, you can roll your own code pretty easily. This can be dirt cheap too, if you’re building off of some simple microcontrollers such as the Arduino. All you need are IR detectors (e.g., RadioShack) and IR LEDs (e.g., RadioShack), both of which are cheap. For example, to turn on a circuit could be a 700 ms pulse of IR, and to turn off a circuit could be a 250 ms pulse, and all the slave with the IR detector needs to do is to measure the pulse length.