PR: Encode/Decode

Objective

This project challenges teams of two students to transmit a message through an arbitrary medium, encoding and decoding a given message using the specified or randomly chosen media. One student will be responsible for encoding and sending the message, and the other for receiving and decoding it. A successful project will accurately restore the original message.
This project is based on Claude Shannon's 1948 work in Communication Theory, which abstracted human communication into channels. Shannon's communication channel consisted of a sender (a source of information), a transmission medium (with noise and distortion), and a receiver (whose goal is to reconstruct the sender's messages). Encoding and decoding were implied, though Shannon was working with the telephone company and the messages were human voices compressed by the medium of the telephone network.

Assignment

Work in teams of two. Your task is to send a message and encode it into a form that can be communicated through a medium and then restored to the original message. Both message and medium will be established by playing a white elephant game.

Example Media

• A steel pipe
• An RGB LED
• A cup and string phone
• A ray of light (laser)

Message

• 8x8 pixel 1-bit image of Space Invader
• Forward / left / right / back
• The color blue
• an arbitrary WAV file