Communications: IrDA
Functional Description

Beaming is a settings application that allows the user to set-up the device to receive and send data via an integrated infra-red (IR) port.

Features

• Activate or Deactivate the IR Port
• IrDA Remote Device Discovery
• Send/Receive Data

Activate or Deactivate the IR Port

The infrared port can be in one of the following states:

• Off
• On indefinitely
• enabled in a one-shot mode
• set to turn off automatically after a given timeout (e.g. 5 minutes)

The last two modes have the advantage that the user does not need to remember
to deactivate IR beaming after the transmissions have been completed.

Note: If the IR function is left on, more power may be used by
the device and undesired interactions with IR capable devices may take
place. It is therefore recommended that it be turned off when not needed.

The user is able to:

• Select "Off" to deactivate the IR port. (Used if the IR port has been set to "On" using the next option).
• Select "On" to activate the IR port and have it remain on until turned off (caution: see Note above).
• Activate the IR port and automatically deactivate after 5 minutes (delay fixed, not user configurable).
• Activate the IR port and automatically deactivate after transmitting one item.

IrDA Remote Device Discovery

Devices fitted with an infra-red port may use infra-red communications (IR) to transmit and receive data with other devices, desktop computers or printers etc.. which have IR capability. In order to communicate, the devices must support device and service discovery.

The IrDA stack in the operating system performs most of the heavy lifting for these tasks. Applications can interface with the OS stack through system calls. Qt Extended provides an interface for accessing this information.

Send/Receive Data

The user is able to

• Receive files or data such as vCards from remote devices
• Send files or data to remote devices

The transfer is done via OBEX protocol with IrDA reliable stream-oriented transmission protocol as the transport.
For compatibility purposes, vCards and other PIM items can be encoded in the following character encodings:

• Standard (UTF8)
• Palm OS
• quoted ASCII