Thanks for the quick response.
Yes, the IrDA dongle may not be the best way to do this. I tried to read the
ir emitter on the device, but it seems that my dongle only can read input
that follow the IrDA spec. Just thought I should give it a try since I have
a dongle lying around in the house. But I'm about to give up soon, because
it seems that I can't do too many consecutive dev.read() in a row before
IDLE throws an error saying that the dongle is not working.
The device? It's an electric meter that measures the current electric
consumption in my house. Installed by the electric company. It communicates
with the electric company over the internet, but the IR pulse is the only
way for me to read the meter. It has a screen with accumulated consumption
since the meter got installed but the resolution is kWh. I would like to see
what happens if I plug in a light bulb etc.
I will look into the MCU solution. Thank you!
/Tomas
2011/2/23 Xiaofan Chen <xiaof...@gmail.com>
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:21 AM, Tomas Hektor <tomas.hek...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > My goal is to use an old usb irda dongle with SigmaTel chipset to record
> > IR impulses from the electric system in my house. The electric device
> > omits an IR impulse at the speed of 1000 impulses/kWh and my aim is to
> > register the time between these pulses to compute what electric effect
> > my whole house is consuming at the moment.
> >
> > I pointed my tv remot towards the dongle when I did a read operation:
> > >>> dev.read(0x82,7)
> > array('B', [255])
> >
> > It's a long shot but does anyone know how to interpret the result from
> > read()?
> >
>
> In that case, you have to know how this USB Irda dongle works.
> And a TV remote may be too complicate to start the experiment.
> I would use a simple IR emitter (constant frequency) as the
> starting point. In any case, this task may not be that simple.
>
> Back to your task, I think that the USB Irda dongle
> may not be the best solution. I would use a MCU based
> system which has an Infrared receiver to count the pulse
> and then the MCU can communicate with the PC using
> either USB or Serial.
>
> BTW, what is the electric device you have? I would expect
> it comes others ways of reading the kWh and not only
> rely on IR pulse.
>
>
>
> --
> Xiaofan
>
>
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