i guess all optical fiber is either that or a long cylinder of flexible glass but this is like. Almost rubbery plastic, you're not going to break it from bending it too sharply like high-performance optical fiber
it doesn't even use a laser diode for a transmitter, it's just a plain old LED that can't even turn on and off all that fast compared to modern optical communications systems
@Tathar It needs to be transparent and relatively flexible but not necessarily rubbery. it's more of a light guide than a true optical fiber.
Does it not rely on total internal reflection?
@Tathar It does, but that can happen with anything with an index of refraction different from that of air
Wouldn't recycled plastics have a non-constant index of refraction? (Does that even matter here, or would the shape of fiber optics make that a meaningless concern?)
@Tathar Not if you recycle them the right way for this kind of use
remember, toslink is *incredibly* low-performance optic fiber. It's practically a joke
@Tathar honestly i'm not sure why you would want to make something similar to toslink in the first place
toslink cables can't be more than like half a meter long without data loss, the data rate is easily outstripped by USB, about its only advantage is isolation which there are other easy ways to do, too
@Tathar I guess the plastic is probably cheaper than copper though
That's the point. I suppose it wouldn't need to be toslink either. If you're just sending data, it should be fine to convert from copper on both sides, right?
@Felthry
Which plastics would be suitable, and could we use ocean plastic for something like toslink?