Cross-Platform Serial in General

Jim Gettys Jim.Gettys at hp.com
Wed Mar 16 21:00:09 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 12:56 -0800, Ned Konz wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 March 2005 11:37 am, Dan Ingalls wrote:
> > IrDA:  I wish I knew more about it.  Is it just computer-to-computer, or is
> > it compatible with all the hand-held remote controllers and their hosts
> > like TVs, boom boxes, even some cameras?  It would be cool to write Squeak
> > programs on PDAs that could work as smart remotes.
> 
> IrDA is (as I understand) not generally used by TV remote controls.
> 
> They instead use a simpler coding scheme, without the block-level checksums, 
> etc. that the IrDA protocol specifies.
> 
> Of course, once you have IR hardware on a PDA you may be able to drive it to 
> put out the TV remote control codes too. One downside might be that you have 
> to be very accurate about frequencies and timing; I don't think Squeak can 
> reliably put out a 38KHz pulse train with that kind of accuracy on most PDAs.
> 

Later iPAQ's can in fact do this, IIRC, at least at the hardware level.
The early ones would not deal with consumer IR (which is much brighter
than the IR in IRDA).  I don't know what the current state of the
software is on various OS's, though.
			- Jim






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