Hey guys.

I am working on a LED-Based Wireless Communications (Li-Fi).
Currently i am stuck at how to extract data from harddisk(a video file or an audio file), Once the data is extracted ie 0's and 1's then that will be given as an serial input to LED driver which turns LED ON and OFF respectively.

so my question was can Matlab do the work of extracting zeros and ones from harddisk and transmit serially via a port from PC to an LED driver and then at the receiver end it has to decode to put the file back together.

if am not clear enough please let me know. Or please find the below blockdiagram image

 

Matlab was designed to do one thing one thing really well; operate on matrices. It may be possible but there are certainly better ways to do it. Are you suggesting it because it is the only tool you are familiar with? If the only tool you had was a hammer; would everything start to look like a nail?

 

Matlab was designed to do one thing one thing really well; operate on matrices. It may be possible but there are certainly better ways to do it. Are you suggesting it because it is the only tool you are familiar with? If the only tool you had was a hammer; would everything start to look like a nail?

I dont even know how to use MATLAB and i dont know any other software either. It would be great if you could help me figure this out please.

 

I dont even know how to use MATLAB and i dont know any other software either. It would be great if you could help me figure this out please.

You have much to learn -- young Jedi. In order to run a marathon you must first learn to crawl and walk. A general purpose programming language learn you must. Back come you when task complete.

 

You have much to learn -- young Jedi. In order to run a marathon you must first learn to crawl and walk. A general purpose programming language learn you must. Back come you when task complete.

i am a EC engineer and dont know shit about CS or programming and software and currently my project requires software to run.. so my question was so simple can i USE matlab to do the task of extracting data if no which software or programming language can!!!!

 

Any app that can read and write files is able to "extract" data from a hard drive. I wouldn't call it a programming language if it cannot.

The harder part is interfacing with the real world to accomplish the LED flashing and receiving. That requires hardware that can talk to a computer.

I would use data acquisition hardware for this. For instance I have a Labjack U3 that I can control with Excel, and it could handle this chore. There are probably cheaper solutions but few as easy.

 

i am a EC engineer and dont know shit about CS or programming and software and currently my project requires software to run.. so my question was so simple can i USE matlab to do the task of extracting data if no which software or programming language can!!!!

I'm trying hard to be helpful. Your chances of success are much greater if you select tools and components that are appropriate to the job. You are the one and only judge of what tools are appropriate. My opinions don't really count for much since I have no idea about your background or your capability. If you were paying me to do this job for a fixed price I would not waste my time with Matlab. One primary reason is that it is an interpreted language instead of a compiled language. If you don't know what that implies; then trust me that it may take orders of magnitude more time to do anything except matrix operations with Matlab. Could you do it as a demonstration of Matlab's capabilities -- maybe. If you have the time and the resources, then you can take that bet, and live with the results.

 

It looks like you can accomplish this with MatLab, but you need to know how to program, what the format of your input file is, how to code for error detection and correction, can select an appropriate communications protocol (or can design your own...) I may have forgotten something.

For example, how do you tell if a high value from the photodiode is a single '1' bit or two '1's?

Since I only did a quick research and am not a MatLab expert, there may be libraries available that do much of this. But I am sure it will be more complicated than your block diagram.

 

Matlab also has a fairly steep learning curve. All the documentation is online and you really have to know what you are looking for to find anything. You can literally waste hours looking for information on a particular subject if you don't know the correct keywords. I don't know what an EC engineer is or how such a person might deal with the enormity of Malab without a viable roadmap.