Guys,
has anyone of you ever dealt with IR I/O? I mean all those neat things with remote control, data xchange between computers and different devices (cell phones, whatever)?
I have a few questions.
- Do all of those widely spread commercial IR devices work using the same physical protocol (the freq/wavelength range, modulation (pulse modulation supposedly), etc)?
- Are you aware of any cheap IR ports (or IR-photo diode / IR-LED pairs) for PCs, which aren't equipped with such (e.g. may have only a UART-IR transciever on the mobo or nothing at all)?
- Do you know any cheap and easy to use (sorry, easy to connect & solder :) UART-IR transcievers with IR diode pairs?
What I want is interfacing of a custom device with a PC wirelessly. And this interfacing should be both easy to implement (little of circuitry and of course preferrably cheap) and easy to use (for a dumb device & PC user). I've seen a few chips that kinda transform regular UART RX/TX into IR, but I'm not really sure it's all that simple. I'm concerned of the compatibility, want to make sure I can interface the device with a regular desktop PC and this should probably work just fine with notebooks, but I've never tried.
Please advise.
Thanks Alex