i like toslink because its entire reason for existing is "hey optical fiber is cool, let's use it for this thing even though it's the 90s and we don't have the technology to do it well yet"
its purpose could easily be filled by a copper cable but optical fiber is Cool™er
it's not very good optical fiber which means it's cheap, too
it's literally just like. A long cylinder of flexible transparent plastic
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
I wonder if optical fiber could be made from recycled plastic.
@Tathar The high-quality sort you might have trouble with, but stuff you can use for toslink definiitely
Which plastics would be suitable, and could we use ocean plastic for something like toslink?
@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 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?
@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