Obtaining Information about the Infrared Port in Laptops

Linux Infrared HOWTO
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# 4.1. Obtaining Information about the Infrared Port in Laptops

To get the IrDA port of your laptop working with Linux/IrDA you may use StandardInfraRed (SIR) or FastInfraRed (FIR).

## 4.1.1. SIR

Up to 115.200bps, the infrared port emulates a serial port like the 16550A UART. This will be detected by the kernel serial driver at boot time, or when you load the serial module. If infrared support is enabled in the BIOS, for most laptops you will get a kernel message like:

    Serial driver version 4.25 with no serial options enabled
    ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A     #first serial port /dev/ttyS0
    ttyS01 at 0x3000 (irq = 10) is a 16550A    #e.g. infrared port
    ttyS02 at 0x0300 (irq = 3) is a 16550A     #e.g. PCMCIA modem port

## 4.1.2. FIR

If you want to use up to 4Mbps, your machine has to be equipped with a certain FIR chip. You need a certain Linux/IrDA driver to support this chip. Therefore you need exact information about the FIR chip. You may get this information in one of the following ways:

1. Read the specification of the machine, though it is very rare that you will find enough and reliable information there.

2. Try to find out whether the FIR chip is a PCI device. Do a cat /proc/pci . The appropriate files for 2.2.x kernels are in `/proc/bus/pci` . Though often the PCI information is incomplete. You may find the latest information about PCI devices and vendor numbers in the kernel documentation usually in `/usr/src/linux/Documentation` or at the page of Craig Hart. From kernel 2.1.82 on, you may use lspci from the pci-utils package, too.

3. Use the DOS tool CTPCI330.EXE provided in ZIP format by the German computer magazine CT. The information provided by this program is sometimes better than that provided by the Linux tools.

4. Try to get information about Plug-and-Play (PnP) devices. Though I didn't use them for this purpose yet, the isapnp tools, could be useful.

5. If you have installed the Linux/IrDA® software load the FIR modules and watch the output of dmesg, whether FIR is detected or not.

6. Another way how to figure it out explained by Thomas Davis (modified by WH): "Dig through the FTP site of the vendor, find the Windows9x FIR drivers, and they have (for a SMC chip):

       -rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert       743 Apr  3  1997 smcirlap.inf
       -rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert     17021 Mar 24  1997 smcirlap.vxd
       -rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert      1903 Jul 18  1997 smcser.inf
       -rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert     31350 Jun  7  1997 smcser.vxd

   If in doubt, always look for the .inf/.vxd drivers for Windows95. Windows95 doesn't ship with _ANY_ FIR drivers. (they are all third party, mostly from Counterpoint, who was assimilated by ESI)."

7. Also Thomas Davis found a package of small DOS utilities made by SMSC. Look at IR_UTILS.ZIP The package contains FINDCHIP.EXE. And includes a FIRSETUP.EXE utility that is supposed to be able to set all values except the chip address. Furthermore it contains BIOSDUMP.EXE, which produces this output:

   Example 1 (from a COMPAQ Armada 1592DT)

       In current devNode:
                  Size      = 78
                  Handle    = 14
                  ID        = 0x1105D041 = 'PNP0511' -- Generic IrDA SIR
       Types:  Base = 0x07, Sub = 0x00,  Interface = 0x02
       Comm. Device, RS-232, 16550-compatible
       Attribute = 0x80
                       CAN be disabled
                       CAN be configured
       BOTH Static & Dynamic configuration
       Allocated Resource Descriptor Block TAG's:
       TAG=0x47, Length=7 I/O Tag, 16-bit Decode
       Min=0x03E8, Max=0x03E8
       Align=0x00, Range=0x08
       TAG=0x22, Length=2 IRQ Tag, Mask=0x0010
       TAG=0x79, Length=1 END Tag, Data=0x2F

   Result 1:

   Irq Tag, Mask (bit mapped - ) = 0x0010 = 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 so, it's IRQ 4. (start at 0, count up ..), so this is a SIR only device, at IRQ=4, IO=x03e8.

   Example 2 (from an unknown machine)

       In current devNode:
                 Size      = 529
                 Handle    = 14
                 ID        = 0x10F0A34D = 'SMCF010' -- SMC IrCC
       Types:  Base = 0x07, Sub = 0x00,  Interface = 0x02
       Comm. Device, RS-232, 16550-compatible
       Attribute = 0x80
                      CAN be disabled
                      CAN be configured
       BOTH Static & Dynamic configuration

       Allocated Resource Descriptor Block TAG's:
       TAG=0x47, Length=7 I/O Tag, 16-bit Decode
       Min=0x02F8, Max=0x02F8
       Align=0x00, Range=0x08
       TAG=0x22, Length=2 IRQ Tag, Mask=0x0008
       TAG=0x47, Length=7 I/O Tag, 16-bit Decode
       Min=0x02E8, Max=0x02E8
       Align=0x00, Range=0x08
       TAG=0x2A, Length=2 DMA Tag, Mask=0x02, Info=0x08
       TAG=0x79, Length=1 END Tag, Data=0x00

   Result 2:

   a) it's a SMC IrCC chip

   b) one portion is at 0x02f8, has an io-extent of 8 bytes; irq = 3

   c) another portion is at 0x02e8, io-extent of 8 bytes; dma = 1 (0x02 =0000 0010)

   | The package is not intended for the end user, and some of the utilities could be harmful. The only documentation in the package is in Microsoft Word format.

8. Use the Device Manager of the MicroSoft Windows9x/NT operating system.

9. You may also use the hardware surveys mentioned below.

10. And as a last resort, you may even open the laptop and look at the inscriptions at the chips themselfs. Here is a probably incomplete list of manufacturers: Chrystal, Hewlett Packard (HP, chipsets are marked HSDL), Hitachi, IBM, National Semi Conductor (NSC), NEC, Philips, Sharp, Standard Micro Systems Corporation (SMC/SMSC), Texas Instruments (TI), VLSI, Winbond. As an example of application circuits the HSDL-7001 (from a HP brochure, modified by WH):

            LEDs    Encode/Decode    SIR/FIR

           HSDL-1001    HSDL-7001      UART 16550/
                          MicroController
           ______      ______________      ____________
          |      |    |              |    |            |
        (||   TXD|<---|IR_TXD     TXD|<---|SOUT        |
          |      |    |              |    |            |
          |      |    |           RCV|--->|SIN        |
          |      |    |              |    |            |
        (||   RCV|--->|IR_RCV  16XCLK|<---|BAUDOUT     |
          |      |    |          NRST|-+  |            |
           ------      --------------  |   ------------
                                       V

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