argh now I have to get back to that project. Let me think about it some more.
(Weird and seldom-discussed characteristic of LED's: they work in both directions. If you put power on them they shine light, but if you shine bright light on them they put out a bit of electricity. So, you can use them for bidirectional communications, and if you're flashing them fast enough nobody can tell visually that they're sending signals and others are, in their off time receiving those signals.
Unfortunately it gets very complicated very quickly when you have a dozen of them all trying to talk at the same time, when some can't see the others.
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Date: 2016-03-19 03:31 am (UTC)(Weird and seldom-discussed characteristic of LED's: they work in both directions. If you put power on them they shine light, but if you shine bright light on them they put out a bit of electricity. So, you can use them for bidirectional communications, and if you're flashing them fast enough nobody can tell visually that they're sending signals and others are, in their off time receiving those signals.
Unfortunately it gets very complicated very quickly when you have a dozen of them all trying to talk at the same time, when some can't see the others.