Divarin
Veteran Member
Hi all. I have a number of handheld PDAs all of which have IrDA (infrared) ports. I've never used these ports but I was thinking it would be nice to be able to use the IrDA port to do some telnet BBSing.
I recently picked up an HP 620lx. I'd like to be able to telnet into BBSs on this thing wirelessly. The two options that first come to mind is to pick up a serial cable and use that to connect either to a PC running TCPSER or a stand-alone wifi232 device. The other option would be to find a PCMCIA wifi card which is compatible with this PDA.
I don't really like either of these options because: The serial cable is rare and expensive. Also to have a cable running out of it and then having a USB power cord running to the wifi232 device kind of destroys the convenience of a portable device. As for the PCMCIA wifi card I don't like that option either because even if I did find one that would be compatible it wouldn't support modern WPA2 encryption and I'd have to set up a second (and not very secure) wireless access point on my home network.
So I was looking at this product: https://irdroid.eu/product/irda-pihat/ and was wondering if I could use that to get a raspberry pi to act as a bridge. I'm thinking have it sit in my living room where I have direct line of sight from the couch, PDA can communicate with the PI via IrDA and the PI would act as a bridge to the internet.
However this board is just a project board so although it might be all I need in terms of hardware I may end up having to write my own software to run on the PI (and maybe the PDA as well). So I thought before I even start with that it would be nice to see if anyone else has tried to do this or something similar or if there is a cleaner/simpler solution I am overlooking.
I recently picked up an HP 620lx. I'd like to be able to telnet into BBSs on this thing wirelessly. The two options that first come to mind is to pick up a serial cable and use that to connect either to a PC running TCPSER or a stand-alone wifi232 device. The other option would be to find a PCMCIA wifi card which is compatible with this PDA.
I don't really like either of these options because: The serial cable is rare and expensive. Also to have a cable running out of it and then having a USB power cord running to the wifi232 device kind of destroys the convenience of a portable device. As for the PCMCIA wifi card I don't like that option either because even if I did find one that would be compatible it wouldn't support modern WPA2 encryption and I'd have to set up a second (and not very secure) wireless access point on my home network.
So I was looking at this product: https://irdroid.eu/product/irda-pihat/ and was wondering if I could use that to get a raspberry pi to act as a bridge. I'm thinking have it sit in my living room where I have direct line of sight from the couch, PDA can communicate with the PI via IrDA and the PI would act as a bridge to the internet.
However this board is just a project board so although it might be all I need in terms of hardware I may end up having to write my own software to run on the PI (and maybe the PDA as well). So I thought before I even start with that it would be nice to see if anyone else has tried to do this or something similar or if there is a cleaner/simpler solution I am overlooking.