Subject:
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Re: legOS
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Tue, 1 Dec 1998 00:42:25 GMT
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Viewed:
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2574 times
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Kekoa Proudfoot wrote in message ...
> George McBay <lego-robotics@crynwr.com> wrote:
> > One other thing that did catch my eye though, was the claim of a patent
> > pending on the IR communication system the RCX uses....
>
> Where did you see that? It didn't catch my eye.
Oh, I forgot to comment on this. Companies are patent crazy, if it's not
done the "usual" way, they'll try to patent it, EVEN IF IT SEEMS LIKE
ANYONE COULD FIGURE IT OUT.
The IR transmission is a bit unusual in that the bytes are send as inverted
pairs (if memory serves correctly). This helps to equalize the number of
ones and zeros, which helps in biasing the IR receiver circuitry at the
expense of slower effective communication. It also serves as a "check",
if you XOR successive bytes, the result is FFs.
I don't doubt there is a patent pending, but the question is what is patented.
Is it the actual message structure, the balanced 1/0 stream, the receiver circuit?
Since legOS is using the hardware supplied by TLG and we are not trying to
duplicate it, there should be no problem.
ANYTHING we do is bound to help TLG, not hurt it. Has anyone of the
hard workers on the project got a letter from TLG yet? If not, then
TLG is probably (privately) hoping like hell that you keep on doing
your work. Who knows, you may even get a nice letter asking for access
to your code for their next generation product....see my msg referring
to Hewlett Packard and the HP41.
Cheers,
Ralph Hempel - P.Eng
------------------------------------------------------
The train stops at the train station,
The bus stops at the bus station,
So why am I sitting at a work station?
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Reply to: rhempel at bmts dot com
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