Matt Carlson wrote: > I'm going to use my Handspring Visor's IR port instead > of the universal remote. Okay then you will be using completely different parts and protocols. The Visor has an IrDA transceiver, which has both transmit and receive channels, designed to carry streams of serial data just like an RS232 port but riding on infrared transmissions. The universal IR remote is much simpler, for one thing the remote is only a transmitter and the radio shack IR decoder is only a receiver. The universal IR remote sends short bursts of unique codes, and the IR decoder simply reads them and passes them to the microcontroller in a TTL serial connection at 893 baud. The IrDA device OTOH is a complete serial communications port. > I have the Visor with me all the time, and I've always > wanted to find a way to control my wearable through it Okay, then you have more work to do than simply attaching three wires to the radio shack IR decoder and opening a port to receive data. You need to interface an infrared transceiver. I just checked the manual for my PCM-5822 and discovered that it has a connector for this, yours might too, check the manual. If it has this port, you should be able to but a transceiver and plug it in, then use standard drivers and APIs to interface. If it does not have the port, you'll have to add a circuit to one of your serial ports to convert the signals (there are schematics on the web for this). Your code will be much different than mine. All I do is receive a code and send it to the PC. Yours is a serial channel, it doesn't send anything unless you tell it to. You'll have to write a small app on the Visor that sends some kind of codes or commands, then write the code for the CPU side that recives the codes and takes action based on which are received. You will be effectively doing the same thing that I do for communication between microcontrollers along a 9600/8N1 serial line. In fact, you could follow the same protocol that I just designed using the ESC CTL-Letter [DeviceID][State] scheme. All you would need to do is generate these same codes on the Visor, and do what my microcontroller does on the wearable (watch for the ESC CTL code and process the associated command). Here are a couple of sites for info on the IrDA procotol: http://www.irda.org/ http://www.us-epanorama.net/irda.html And BTW here is info on remote controls (not IrDA) http://www.us-epanorama.net/irremote.html > I have some questions: > I just went to radio shack and picked up an 276-137B IR > detector module. Where did you mount this thing? This detector cannot talk to your Visor's IR port. All this one does is watch for the short burts of codes that remote controls for TVs and VCRs send. There are ways to build your own tranmitters to generate these codes, but that doesn't make sense on Visor since it already has an IrDA port. Check the specs for your EM-350 and see if it has a connector for IrDA transceiver ... > Where can I find a BX-24 for the best price? So far > I've only seen them listed on the manufactuers web > site for $49.. although this isn't at all > bad, I'm wondering if I can find it for better. I have some bad news. Last time I checked the price was up to $59 for individual BX24s. Also you need to buy the software. There is a kit for $100 that includes a proto board, one BX24, serial download cable, and the software. More bad news: it only runs on windows. It is literally the ONLY peice of windows software I use. > This last one I need to do research on myself, but > I'll ask anyway. I've never programmed a microcontroler > before. For this spacific one (the BX-24) where do > I find a website on how to build a programmer, and > what software am I going to need to use? It seems that all of these basic microcontrollers (parallax basic stamp, netmedia bx24, and protean logic TICkit) don't require hardware programmers. Instead you run software on a PC and download to the microcontroller via serial cable. For other more traditional assembly and C based micros you often need a programmer. It may be cheaper to use the parallax stamps, but the netmedia BX24s are much more capable. I don't think I'd even try these multiplexing tricks with parallax stamps. I also have some protean logic TICkits, they are also $59 each and the software is $35 so they are about the same price for approximately the same feature set. You could of course dive into C/ASM programming of PICs or Atmel microcontrollers, but I think that the basic dialect is a good way to start, and they have quite an impressive feature set for communications and all kinds of interfacing. -- Doug ------------------------------------------------------------ Grow your own Wearables: http://wearables.los-gatos.net What I'd like is to have you call me and my jacket answers ------------------------------------------------------------ -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org please, Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/false domain
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