KORUZA 1.0 scientific website
scientific.koruza.net — features, specifications, history, testing, events and publications.
KORUZA v1
The low-cost, open-source and open-hardware wireless optical system where KORUZA began.
From a student idea to an open testbed
KORUZA started in 2012 as VALET, a Very Affordable Laser Ethernet Transceiver, developed by Luka Mustafa with Dr. Benn Thomsen at UCL in London. The idea was to reuse mass-produced SFP fibre transceivers and 3D printed optics to bring free space optics to community networks at a fraction of the usual cost.
Five prototype generations followed. KORUZA 1.0, released in 2015 for scientific research, was fully modular, designed in OpenSCAD and published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, with a complete assembly kit and step-by-step instructions so researchers could build, understand and modify it.
1 Gbps
data rate over a single link
100 m
link distance
20 dB
optical link margin
Milestones
2012 — VALET idea and first prototype, tested at 100 m.
2013 — Paper "Reintroducing Free-space Optical technology to Community Wireless Networks" presented at AMCIS 2013, Chicago; Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant; second prize at the IEEE ComSoc Student Competition.
2014 — Institute IRNAS founded; NLnet Foundation grant; generation 3–5 prototypes; World Wide KORUZA experiment with ten links across the globe.
2015 — Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship; KORUZA 1.0 for scientific research; manufacturing company Fabrikor established.
Archived websites
Complete copies of the KORUZA v1 websites, kept here unchanged so nothing is lost when the koruza.net domain is retired.
Assembly instructions and user manual
instructions.koruza.net — the illustrated step-by-step assembly guide, bill of materials, overview and user manual.
Source files: Mechanical and electronic designs remain on GitHub in the IRNAS/KORUZA repository. github.com/IRNAS/KORUZA
Snapshot taken on 24 September 2026. Pages are kept exactly as published; links to outside services may no longer work.