Ir Comm

you should look only at the first layer specification to the IrDA. they have nonintuitive information regarding pulse timing issues. most coders here would think of ir-comm as nothing but fed with rs232 serial communications; there are some good reasons for not doing it that simply.

don't use the irda and don't use the special timing converter chips for encoding and decoder serial rs232 to irda timing; you don't need the additional expense and circuitry if you're not going irda.

a steve suggested, you can simply bit-bang a port to the irda channel and design your on protocol. if you would rather simplify and speed up the project at some sacrifice to quality of communications, go ahead a slam the ir comm out of the serial pins of the 8051.

if your unit is battery driven (remote keyboards tend to be) then you have a power consumption issue. the high speed irda links have some distance requirements that make them consume power (hence the minimized on-time pulsing). a remote keyboard could be designed more along the lines of a tv remote control... never powered on UNTIL a key is pressed.

irda is great once you suffer long and hard for it. :)

duh