On what we call Pattern Fridays, we take time out to explore new technologies and how they could be applied to existing and future client projects. This often involves playing with hardware and software and seeing where it takes us. Pattern Fridays are all about lofty goals and tricky tasks to challenge our skills, creativity and experience. We love this stuff.

The goal for one Pattern Friday was to be able to communicate wirelessly without using common technologies like Bluetooth, wifi or cellular data. So, since we were already working on a project that involved radio transmitters, we decided to try and reverse-engineer the 2.4ghz signal from a Spektrum receiver.

Reverse-engineering a receiver’s signal has many advantages for interactive installations – it could allow you to communicate in hard to reach places or remote locations that don’t have access to wifi or other network connectivity. Some receivers are capable of ranges of a few thousand feet. And, once decoded, you could send commands to a remote microcontroller to trigger things like lighting or motors, or web commands like automated posting to social media networks. That could make for some cool solutions.