IrDA communications

[Sébastien Dugué]

Hello Willem,

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 7:00 AM, Willem Ferguson
<willemferguson at zoology.up.ac.za> wrote:
> Sebastien,
>
> The Uwatec/Scubapro IrDA adapters are indeed based on the Moschip MCS 7780,
> as you say, still commonly and cheaply available.

  Thanks for the info. I never bought the overpriced Uwatec adapter
but only really
cheap chinese ones. I've got a STIR4200 based one and a more obscure
Tanic S110 one. The S100 is a quasi-clone of the STIR4200 but with the endpoints
shufffled. I had to hack the stir4200 driver to be able to use it.

> One area outside diving
> where IrDA is till commonly used is in high-voltage environment
> instrumentation where radio-based communication faces too much noise.

  Never though of that, but that makes a lot of sense.

> The problem with IrDA is probably the communications protocol that is not
> maintained any more.

  Right, and for a reason, it's so bloated that nobody longer really
cares with it.

> 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.

  Agreed.

  Cheers,
  Sébastien.