While I might not recommend it either, depending on the product and application, I'd want to retain the flexibility to send that urgent update by email NOW rather than fighting customs and paying a fortune to get cards sent by rapid overseas delivery methods. Deliberately designing a system that requires special equipment to generate the cards is not a wise plan. Serial-lock the updates if necessary.
This has caused bureaucratic trouble in the past. Not something I'd want to get into.
Makes you wish that there had been a collection of MAC address that were non-routeable or usable on serial links like PPP that could have been allocated to aid development for low budget start ups.
Like non-routeable IP addresses.
--
Paul Carpenter | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
PC Services
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We used an Oxford 16550 clone UART, that has a built in IrDA driver. We ran the IrDA protocol stack on our microcontroller.
--Gene
The user would be holding the dongle up to the system anyway and they have already used slow IrDA on this system already so I reckon that should be fine.
I once took my MS RF keyboard to vendor's site and managed to interfere with just about every other RF device there so I'm certainly wary of that.
I think my worry was that, although 4Mbps is available, in practical use it would negotiate itself down to a lower speed.
For your application, why bother? Use locally assigned addresses (see
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