In one of the finest examples of what overly-entitled, First World westerners get up to during cold, winter months, a Frenchman called Maximilien has raised the useless-applications-of-technology stakes and turned a model railway into one of the world’s slowest computer networks.

The video below is a good starting point, but then read on for a description of how TCP/IP is actually transported over a Lego train carrier. Basically, on the back of each train is a USB memory key (literally a key in this case; the French have a good sense of humor) with four dangling wires attached to each of the key’s interface pins. The train chugs around the track until it reaches a station (a relay turns the power off when a train approaches), where an Arduino board interfaces with the USB key via a very complex piece of cardboard wrapped in aluminium foil (see gallery below).

Once the train is docked, the USB memory is mounted and the packet (data) is extracted and forwarded to the Linux computer connected to the Arduino station. In effect, the train and railway is acting as a three-computer switch. The latency might be very high (5-10 seconds), but the throughput is probably very good — much like the old IT adage that the best way to move large amounts of data between two places is to load up a truck with tapes or hard drives.

Now we just hope that Maximilien takes the effort to push his new network topology all the way to an RFC, like IP over Carrier Avians, IPv6 over Social Networks, or my personal favorite, Increasing Throughput in IP Networks with ESP-Based Forwarding.

Read more at Hackaday