I would like to see some inexpensive plastic optical fiber (POF), and a a way to finish it, including ‘serial transponders’ that would allow me to connect it to my projects.
As a secondary project, basically use the ‘stuff’ from above, to do an inexpensive ethernet extender’ with an RJ45 on each end and a lenght of POF in the center.
I understand that POF has a 150’ or so useful limit, but I don’t know if that is at gigabit, or 10megabit, or slower.
Does that make sense?
Reasoning:
POF is inexpensive, and in ‘electronically noisy’ environments, like running beside power cables inside robots it would make a rock steady way to send data at any reasonable speed back and forth.
On the second, I would like to run some POF through a shop with lots of machines (like a hacker space/home shop) that has welders, cnc rigs, etc, that would make connections more reliable to the CNC machines from the ‘server’ area.
For another reason…
I also have a friend that ran some ethernet from his house to his garage shop, and lightening in the area has taken out his ethernet wires and ethernet cards 2 or 3 times by local lightening strikes. He has now given up on the connectivity, and the POF would make it pretty much lightening proof.