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Subject: 
RE: Laptop IR
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Thu, 17 Feb 2000 16:31:52 GMT
Original-From: 
Morgan, David <david.morgan@rez.(NoMoreSpam)com>
Viewed: 
713 times
  
Jim,

The IR port on a Dell laptop is basically the same as PowerBook's (it is an
lrDA-1.1 compliant port). It CAN be used as a serial port, unfortunately
just not one that can talk to the RCX easily...

--
David Morgan
Senior Systems Engineer
REZsolutions Inc.

Ben-

I am using a Dell laptop than claims it can be used as a serial port. I
think that it is a different IR port than the Mac. Thanks for the input
though.

Jim

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Ben Wyckoff wrote:

Jim,
I asked this question a few weeks ago, about an Apple
PowerBook IR port.... This is the response I got from Dave Baum:

-------
In theory it may be possible, but in practice it hasn't been done.  The
reason is that the PB uses IrDA (it also features a special Apple-only
protocol), while the RCX uses simple NRZ on a 38kHz carrier.  In theory
you may be able to use one of the higher IrDA baud rates to manually
generate the 38kHz carrier for transmit, but this would require fairly
low level access to the IR hardware.  Receive is an even bigger problem.

When you use the IrDA port as a substitute for a serial port you are
actually running several layers of protocol (IrCOM, TinyTP, IrLAP)
between the virtual serial interface seen by your program and the
physical Ir hardware.  The RCX understands none of these protocols.

---------


So I simply bought an extra IR tower and Mac compatible cable from
Pitsco Lego/Dacta.

- Ben
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Wyckoff                                     wyckoff@clearway.com
Principal Engineer
ClearWay Technologies, LLC.                     www.clearway.com

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -
only I don't exactly know what they are!"
Lewis Carroll, Alice, Through The Looking Glass
------------------------------------------------------------------------



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