Jim,

Use the search windows on www.8052.com and you'll get a list of previous discussions on iRDA. Here's my condensed version.

1). IrDA Spec. Committee was insane.
2). Members created IrDA package firms and got rich.
3). Only they understand it.
4). They charge a percentage of all the money you'll ever make. (Mr. Rumpelstiltskin chaired the committee.)
5). Reasonable people hate IrDA
6). Clever Programmers want to create free IrDA for the beautiful challenge of it.
7). No group has sucessfully gotten started. Fights break out of C, C++, Assembly languages.
8). IrDA has potential but no customers know they need it. Little reason to inform them if you're already selling product.
9). IrDA will be shortly eclipsed by Bluetooth.
10). There are easier ways to make fortunes than programming IrDA.
11). After you've made a fortune, you can commit the time to write IrDA.

That being said, I find IrDA a very interesting topic. But I'm a spooky guy that never shares useful code because that's all intellectual property of my company. I'd love to implement IrDA on my 8051 and I think I could do it extremely concise (I'm a rather clever guy in real life; all evidence here to the contrary). I'd only offer discussions on how to implement it... not how I'd do it. That just makes me all the more annoying on IrDA discussions. hehehehe

I've read the IrDA specification cover to cover about 16 times and I think I understand it and in an ideal world I'd be working on it now an for the next year and a half. But Observation #10 above applies.

I am on OEM for strange radio telemetry applications and no customer of mine knows much about IrDA and so I don't need to do it to increase sales. As an engineer, I can appreciate the improvement of using IrDA but we'll await a better reason to start.

My advice is to download the IrDA specification, weigh it, get really drunk and try to read one chapter.

When you sober up, you'll know that your best next step is to re-evaluate your need for IrDA. We've all been there.

Maybe that is where we should begin the discussion herein?

Is there sufficient reason to take on such a task?

aka Jay on Vacay-tion