Wavelength

Next-Generation Communication System

Wavelength is an advanced, next-generation real-time communication system meticulously designed to facilitate seamless, secure, and intuitive information exchange. This project is a testament to continuous evolution, offering innovative solutions at the forefront of online interaction. Born from a deep understanding of modern communication needs, Wavelength aims to set new standards in digital connectivity, ensuring a robust and feature-rich platform for all your communication needs. It doesn't store any of your data. Really.

🌟 Core Features

Wavelength is packed with features designed to enhance every aspect of your communication. I've focused on delivering a rich, user-friendly experience, crafted from the ground up:

• Sophisticated Text Chat: Engage in reliable and lightning-fast text message exchanges through an intuitively designed interface. Wavelength ensures your conversations are smooth and efficient, supporting various formatting options to enrich your messages. The Chat View is the central hub for all text-based interactions, designed for clarity, readability, and ease of use, making long conversations effortless.

• Advanced PTT (Push-To-Talk) System: Experience fast and efficient voice communication, ideal for dynamic discussions and quick exchanges. The PTT system is optimized for exceptionally low latency, making it ideal for scenarios where instant voice communication is key, invited with walkie-talkies in mind. The feature integrates seamlessly into the chat view, providing a quick way to switch from text to voice with minimal effort.

• Comprehensive Multimedia Support: Effortlessly send and receive a wide array of file formats, including images, videos, and audio (as of state of 11.06.25: no documents yet). Wavelength handles multimedia content with ease, ensuring your files are delivered quickly and displayed correctly. The application's ability to preview and manage various media types directly within conversations streamlines sharing and enhances the interactive experience.

• Intuitive User Interface (UI) & Navigation: Crafted with user comfort and ease of use in mind, Wavelength's interface is clean, uncluttered, and highly responsive. Navigation is straightforward, allowing users to quickly find what they need without unnecessary complexity. The Navigation Bar (Navbar) provides quick access to different sections of the application, while the Network Status Widget keeps you informed about your connection stability and quality in real-time.

• High Performance and Efficiency: Optimized for fluid operation, Wavelength maintains high responsiveness even under intense usage scenarios with numerous active conversations and heavy data traffic. It's underlying architecture minimizes resource consumption while maximizing speed, ensuring a consistently smooth experience across various hardware configurations.

• Extensive Customization Options: Personalize your Wavelength experience to suit your preferences. From applying different themes and managing notification settings to defining specific UI elements, you have the granular control to tailor the application to your liking. This includes options managed by the Appearance settings and the Shortcut Manager for defining personalized keyboard shortcuts, enhancing user productivity and accessibility.

• Astonishing Joy: To create even more immersion, I've added Joy, which imitates the character Joi from Blade Runner movie. It's yours now.

joy.mp4

🏗️ Application Architecture & Core Components

For an in-depth understanding of architectural components, their specific roles, and their interdependencies, please refer to the "Foundation of the Application" and "Communication Architecture" sections in the accompanying PDF.

🛠️ Underlying Technologies

Wavelength is built upon a foundation of best possible technologies, ensuring reliability, exceptional performance, and scalability. My choice of tools reflects our commitment to quality, efficiency, and future-proofing the application:

• Qt5: Yeah. I know Qt6 is available, but I've sticked to the 5th version. The powerful cross-platform application development framework serves as the backbone of Wavelength. It provides the necessary tools for creating rich graphical user interfaces, robust application logic, and handles low-level system interactions. Its extensive module ecosystem (Qt Core, Qt GUI, Qt Widgets, Qt Network, Qt Multimedia, Qt OpenGL, etc.) accelerates development and ensures broad platform compatibility across Windows, and Linux (none of the development was tested on macOS, if you are willing to take a shot, contant me :D).
• OpenGL: Utilized extensively for rendering high-quality graphics and ensuring a smooth visual experience across various devices. Its direct access to hardware capabilities allows for efficient and performant rendering of all visual elements within the application, contributing to its fluid and responsive interface.
• FFmpeg: An indispensable open-source library for handling and decoding diverse multimedia formats. Its robust capabilities for processing audio and video are crucial for Wavelength's seamless multimedia support, enabling efficient encoding, decoding, and streaming of various media types, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of files.
• Other Essential Libraries and Frameworks: A variety of other specialized libraries are integrated to handle specific functionalities such as secure network communication protocols (e.g., for data encryption), efficient data serialization (e.g., JSON parsing for configuration or API calls), cryptographic operations for security, and more, all contributing to the application's comprehensive feature set and robust performance.

A detailed overview of the technologies employed, their specific roles, and their application within the Wavelength project can be found in the "Technologies" section of the PDF.

🚧 Challenges and Solutions

For a more detailed technical dive into the specific challenges faced and the solutions implemented, please refer to the "Issues and solutions" section within the accompanying PDF.

⚙️ System Requirements

To ensure optimal performance and a smooth user experience, please ensure your system meets the following minimum requirements. Meeting these specifications will provide the best Wavelength experience.

• Operating System: The one that supports GUI.
• Processor: The working one.
• RAM: 2 GB of RAM or more recommended for comfortable usage. 2 GB should be perfectly fine.
• Graphics: A dedicated or integrated graphics card with OpenGL 2.1 support or higher. Modern GPUs with OpenGL 3.3+ (or Vulkan/DirectX equivalents) are highly recommended for the best visual experience and hardware-accelerated rendering. This one is actually pretty neccessary for GPU acceleration through various of animations.
• Network: Stable internet connection is required for all real-time communication features (text chat, PTT, multimedia sharing).

The requirements are really low for today standards and that was exactly my goal.

🚀 Getting Started

Currently, there is only one way to use Wavelength on your system. It's by builing it from source.

For Developers: Building Wavelength from Source

If you're a developer, want to contribute, or prefer to host and build the application yourself, follow these steps. This process gives you full control and allows for custom modifications.

Prerequisites for Building

Before you begin, ensure you have the following development tools and libraries installed on your system:

1. Git: For cloning the repository.

   • Download Git

2. CMake (version 3.16 or higher): For managing the build process.

   • Download CMake

3. Qt5 (version 5.x.x): The core framework. You will need the development libraries for the following Qt modules: Qt Core, Qt GUI, Qt Widgets, Qt Network, and Qt Multimedia (including Q5MultimediaWidgets).

4. FFmpeg Development Libraries: Essential for multimedia support (audio/video decoding, encoding, streaming). You'll need libraries like libavcodec-dev, libavformat-dev, libavutil-dev, etc.

   • On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt update && sudo apt install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev
   • On Fedora: sudo dnf install ffmpeg-devel
   • On Windows: This is more complex. You'll typically download pre-built FFmpeg development packages (e.g., from Gyan.dev or BtbN), extract them, and then add their bin and lib directories to your system's PATH or include them directly in your project configuration. Using a package manager like MSYS2/vcpkg is often simpler, since my recommendation: use vcpkg.

5. C++ Compiler: A C++20 compatible compiler toolchain installed for your operating system.

6. libpqxx library - managing PostgreSQL database and connection.

After setting up everything, you should be able to just compile the cloned repo/code on your own machine. By default, Wavelength uses exterrnal server, so for a solitary experience, host your own server, by installing Node and neccessary packages from server directory - npm i.

Configuration of your own server can be provided via Wavelength Settings tab (in application), where you can paste your server address and server port.

⚠️ Known Issues

I've currently found only one issue when using PTT in chat. The issue is only related to Arch Linux and arch based linuxes family, since they have very minimalistic pre-installed configurations. You need to properly configure audio pipeline.

sudo pacman -S pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa pipewire-jack

systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber

Also, Arch has some problems with audio buffers (again: lack of bunch of mostly default pre-installed audio codecs), so for using Arch (just like me: I use arch, btw.) it is advised to use archlinux-audio-fix branch.

Rest of the issues, enhancements and ideas for future or in development can be seen in Issue GitHub tab.

📚 Comprehensive Documentation

A thorough technical documentation of the Wavelength application, encompassing detailed diagrams, complete class descriptions, architectural insights, and API specifications, is available for developers and enthusiasts. This documentation is crucial for understanding the project's internal workings and contributing to its development.

• Online Documentation: Click here This resource provides in-depth information about the application's structure, API, and internal workings, enabling a deeper understanding of the project.

📜 Source Code

Wavelength is an open-source project, and I wholeheartedly invite you to explore its codebase, contribute to its development, and report any issues you encounter. Your feedback, bug reports, and pull requests are invaluable to me in making Wavelength even better!

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. This permissive open-source license allows for broad use, modification, and distribution of the software, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes, with minimal restrictions.

You can find the full text of the license in the LICENSE file in the project's root directory.

👨‍💻 Author

Szymon Wilczek

Student at Silesian University of Technology, Faculty of Automation, Electronics and Computer Science.

The project was created for a semester credit in computer programming. The project is purely hobbyist.

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Thank you for your interest in Wavelength! I sincerely hope you enjoy using and contributing to my next-generation communication application. Your journey towards seamless and innovative communication begins here.

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