Re: [tuxdroid-user] Can you give more doc about RF ?

[David B. <da...@ja...>]

On Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:54:37 +0800, Frans Meulenbroeks  
<fra...@ya...> wrote:

> Hi Nicolas,
>
> The fux uses a proprietary protocol to talk with tux.
> This is not standard 802.11 wifi.
> If you were to implement the protocol/hw in another
> device, I can imagine you can get it going.
> There are some hints in the code that one fux could be
> made to control multiple tuxes, but that part is not
> implemented.

It's mostly because the RF chip of the Atmel module can't handle 802.11,  
and the CPU that drives it has only 4kB of flash memory so you're quite  
limited to some simple potocol.
One dongle could connect to any tux and there are plans indeed to add a  
kind of ID in each tux so you can choose which one to connect to. That way  
it will be possible to disconnect and reconnect to another tux,  
controlling multiple tuxes from one dongle, but not exactly at the same  
time.

>
> The other way is to reprogram the fux driver to use
> the RF protocol you need (assuming the fux is capable
> of that).

Yes you can reprogram whatever you want, but that's a lot of work. I  
should refactor the RF firmware soon, but the low level RF protocol will  
stay close to what it's now probably.

>
> Btw there is one other thing I managed to do.
> It is possible to use the tux to control RC5 devices.
> E.g. I managed to let tux change channels on my
> Philips TV!
> Other ir protocols are technically probably also
> possible but would require changes in the firmware of
> tux as the kysoh firmware only supports RC5. (so if
> you have e.g. a Sony TV some work would be needed).

I wanted to have a kind of universal IR function, capturing and sending  
raw data that only the computer could understand. But then we need more  
data troughput that the current RF firmware doesn't have, thus the need  
for refactoring. But I have no idea if that will be done soon. There are  
many other things to do at the moment. But if someone is looking into  
this, it would be nice to look at some of the open source IR receivers  
that aready have drivers for lirc. If we can use something similar, we  
could reuse the drivers more easily I guess.

David