Developing and Deploying devices

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 06:20:28PM +0300, Miika Turkia wrote:
> > * Dive Computer connectivity
> >   - USB Host to Dive Computer
> >   - USB<->IRDA connector support
> >   - others?
> >   Likely USB is the minimum, and that then things can plug
> >   into it that actually connect to the DC.
> >
> > Linux gives us a wonderful starting point as all the devices will
> > just work and even the iRDA USB plugs usually are supported.
> > This will require some testing to ensure that the right modules
> > are loaded, but that's fairly straight forward
> 
> I am pretty sure we can do this by just connecting an IR led to GPIO
> pins of the board. This works on my Raspberry Pi with a receiver led
> and I don't see why it would not work on a C.H.I.P with a transceiver
> led (or receiver and emitter leds). IIRC I didn't need to do anything
> special to get this to work on the debian based distro I run on the
> Pi. Anyway, I don't see the need for IR to be that common in our
> application - for few people it would be useful, but for most
> unnecessary.

iRDA is one of the fun use cases where potentially a lot of people will
look at this little box. I am quite surprised that on nearly every dive
trip I meet people with the Galileo - and neither Windows 10 nor Mac work
for those out of the box. And that's what 95+% of the divers will have
access to. That and iOS/Android. So I actually think that iRDA will be a
rather useful part of all this. And yes, this could be done with a
transceiver led on GPIO, I think. But all of these people already have an
iRDA USB plug, so I see no reason why we shouldn't simply use those.

/D