News: This product has been revised to be compatible with all Arduino revisions.

This is a Shield for Arduino Leonardo that allows using M122-Series Low Speed Optical Fiber Module for communications.

Story of Creation (the SHONE project)

This board, together with the M122-Series Low Speed Optical Fiber Module, was part of my course project, the Smart Home Optical NEtwork (SHONE) project.

I always believed that Internet of Things and Smart Home systems that relies on wirelessly-accessible network (e.g. Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or wired Ethernet that also includes a Wi-Fi access point) is inherently unsafe due to its communications being more or less transparent to eavesdropper. Imagine a scenario that someone wardriving around the neighborhood with some kind of device that is capable of speaking and listening all common wireless IoT protocols, running some Metasploit-esque software kit scanning and exploiting those IoT systems. It is going to be a nightmare.

The SHONE project proposes the use of cheap optical fiber as the physical medium for IoT system communication. Optical fiber does not emit electromagnetic field nor is it suspect to it, making it immune to such kind of wireless scanning and exploiting. The protocol running on top of the optical medium is 9600 baud 8/N/1 UART, which means that it is simple enough to be understood and spoken by simple microcontrollers using a pair of GPIO pins, even without any hardware support, making the hardware cheaper.

The use of TOSLINK is again because of its price and ubiquity.

The board is delivered with everything except the pin headers soldered.