IrDA communications

[Willem Ferguson]

On 18/04/2018 21:33, Sébastien Dugué wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 9:20 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> If you're more comfortable just sending packets to the device, doing
>> it in user space would be much better.
>   Right, I like writing drivers, but this has to be a userspace thing.
>
>> It would also make it possible to work on OS X, because there's no
>> IRDA stack at all there.
>    I wasn't even aware of that, so that'd be a nice added bonus.
>
>> So a user space stack would likely be simpler, easier to test, and
>> actually technically superior.
>>
>> The "do IRDA in kernel space" made sense back in the bad old days when
>> IRDA was a real protocol used for transferring files and stuff, and
>> was supposed to be generic.
>>
>> It never worked very well even back then, but at least it made sense
>> to have IRDA as a networking stack.
>>
>> Today, the _only_ user I'm aware of is old dive computers. It doesn't
>> make sense as a networking stack any more.
>    Well, they may be old but they're still selling. And I don't have the money
> for those fancy OLED thingies.
>
>    Sébastien.
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Sebastien,

The Uwatec/Scubapro IrDA adapters are indeed based on the Moschip MCS 
7780, as you say, still commonly and cheaply available. One area outside 
diving where IrDA is till commonly used is in high-voltage environment 
instrumentation where radio-based communication faces too much noise. 
The problem with IrDA is probably the communications protocol that is 
not maintained any more. From a hardware point of view infra-red 
communication is cheap and efficient with a much lower parts count than 
BT and with very, very small current drain.

Kind regards,

willem




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