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EW Elliot Williams Editor at Hackaday covering hardware hacks, electronics and maker projects.

“Light is a lot less tweaky than radio. You don't have to worry about… building a damn radio transmitter, and it's not illegal to transmit light. You can transmit light however and wherever you want, and the FCC doesn't even come knocking on your door.”

Hackaday Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“Light is a lot less tweaky than radio. You don't have to worry about… building a damn radio transmitter, and it's not illegal to transmit light. You can transmit light however and wherever you want, and the FCC doesn't even come knocking on your door.” — Elliot Williams, Hackaday Podcast

Context

Elliot was praising a 2017 Supercon talk on infrared hacking that used software-defined radio tools with light as the carrier instead of radio waves. He argues light-modulated projects are a more accessible, unregulated cousin of radio hacking that few people have picked up.

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Transcript

Hackaday Podcast Around 58:36 into the episode
Elliot Williams

…a 50 megahertz carrier on it. That's no problem. So tons of bandwidth with light. And then they're modulating on top of that. And that was when it clicked in my head that, oh, this is actually just the same as radio, only using light that's turning off at 50 kilohertz instead of radio waves. You're

Jenny List

modulating a light beam in that respect with on-off key.

Elliot Williams

…But then you're putting a subcarrier on that and then you're modulating into that. Anyway, it's really cool. And for the low, low cost of basically nothing, you need an infrared diode, a fast amplifier, and then you plug that into GNU radio. You can do all of this kind of analysis and fancy protocol stuff on the sending side, all of this yourself. It's all super cheap, super affordable. And just light is a lot less tweaky than radio. You don't have to worry about any of those, you know, building. A damn radio transmitter, and it's not illegal to transmit light. You can transmit light however and wherever you want, and the FCC doesn't even come knocking on your door. So, I thought it was a really neat talk because it kind of inspired me to think about light-modulated stuff in the same way as radio and being maybe more accessible in a way. And I think I…

Jenny List

Well, certainly, using GNU Radio for more than just specifically radio as a general-purpose DSP package is incredibly underrated. I've been using GNU Radio for audio stuff for YONGS, and I can see that it would be a great thing for doing the signal processing for something that you then key onto an…

Elliot Williams

I want to see people transmitting analog TV streams over infrared. Oh,

Jenny List

that's doable. Like,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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