# Support for IrDA compatible hardware

This topic has been discussed extensively on both the LIRC and Linux-IrDA mailing lists. Just check the according links to the mailing list archives for more information. Also Werner Heuser has gathered very useful information on this topic in part II of his Linux InfraRed-HOWTO.

Everybody agrees that real support for consumer IR applications can only be developed using chipsets that support CIR (consumer IR). Below is a list of chipsets known to meet this condition.

- Winbond W83977F/AF
- SMC IrCC 2.0

As I said on the main page it also works with dongles connected to the serial port but this requires some tweaking of the IrDA physical layer protocol. So you can expect limitations to that approach. From my experience transmitting of IR signals is more likely to work than receiving and actually there seems to exist software that uses this method (OmniRemote, Software for IrDA Devices).

Update: Actually Milan Pikula has written a driver that uses SIR to emulate CIR. In fact if this really works it should be easy to adjust his driver to use the Tekram IRMate IR-210. The code to initialize the dongle is already available.

Recent mails to the Linux-IrDA list also showed that the ACTiSYS ACT-IR200L serial dongle will be able to at least send consumer IR signals as it uses the CS8130 Multi-Standard Infrared Transceiver from Cirrus Logic. I hope that someone will write a LIRC compatible driver soon.

Please note that for technical reasons it's not possible to use USB IrDA dongles with LIRC.

[LIRC Homepage]