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6    Introduction to Infrared Communication (Beaming)

Low-Level Communications

Exploring Palm OS®

Palm OS® provides three levels of support for beaming, or infrared communication (IR):

  • The Exchange Manager provides a high-level interface that handles all of the communication details transparently. See Chapter 4, "Object Exchange," of Exploring Palm OS: High-Level Communications for more information.
  • The Serial Manager provides a virtual driver that implements the IrComm protocol. To use IrComm, you specify sysFileCVirtIrComm as the port you want to open and use the Serial Manager APIs to send and receive data on that port. See Chapter 2, "The Serial Manager," for information on how to use the Serial Manager APIs.
  • The Sockets API lets you use the same functions you would use for other communications methods to perform IR communications.

This chapter focuses on using the Sockets API for beaming.


IMPORTANT: Versions of Palm OS prior to 6.0 offered a separate library, called IRLib, for performing infrared communications. This library has been deprecated and should not be used when creating new applications.

The IR support provided by Palm OS is compliant with the IrDA specifications. IrDA (Infrared Data Association), is an industry body consisting of representatives from a number of companies involved in IR development. For a good introduction to the IrDA standards, see the IrDA web site at:

http://www.IrDA.org/

Palm OS implements all the required protocol layers (SIR, IrLAP, IrLMP, and Tiny TP), as well as the OBEX layer, to support the Exchange Manager, and the stack is capable of connection-based or connectionless sessions.

IrLMP Information Access Service (IAS) is a component of the IrLMP protocol that you will see mentioned in the interface. IAS provides a database service through which devices can register information about themselves and retrieve information about other devices and the services they offer.