Thinkpads Forum

Hey,

I have been playing around with my TP 600 and was wondering about the IR data transfer. I do not currently have any compatible device to test this functionality at the moment and that got me thinking if it would be possible to engineer something.

Few Ideas I have:
- I have an Android phone with an IR sender and receiver. No software other than smart remotes use it, but I can imagine that using the SDK it would be possible to send/receive some binary data. Just a string would already be pretty awesome
- Using some IR dongle and communicate with a modern ThinkPad. Soft for this ofc. would have to be written or possibly somehow route it through a Virtualbox with Win 98. As far as I understand it just acts like a serial device.
- I see that my TP14 also has the IR camera thingy. Could that be controlled or it is just some LED illumination thing on/off?

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Does anybody know how the original Puma IntellySync worked or has any documentation/know-how about the protocol it might have used?
Any other ideas or input regarding about my ramblings above?

Oh well...

The serial and IR interface baud rates are fixed at
9600 baud. The serial interface and IR interface baud
rates are dependent on the device frequency, but IrDA
standard operation requires a device frequency of
3.6864 MHz.

http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/D ... 22050a.pdf


What I have gathered so far is that using the Android IR blaster is not an option since it uses a different operating frequency known as Consumer IR, CIR for short.
The Android phone I have reports an operating range of 30 KHz to 56 KHz, but the IrDa standard mentions use of ranges in MHz, which kind of makes sense considering the speed abilities of the sync.

Having a modern Android act as a IR modem for old ThinkPad would have been such a great flashback to old Nokia times


Off to trying some other method of communication. Need to acquire a IrDa capable dongle or build one. I have seen some Arduino circuits