On Fri, 3 Jun 2011 11:17:23 -0400, you wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I am about to design a product which will be in use for at least 10
>years and needs a medium range (about 50cm max) free-space optical
>data link, low speed (under 9600 bps is fine - even 1200 bps would be
>acceptable). The product contains both sides of the link so it does
>not have to communicate with standard products. It needs to be robust
>to a fair amount of dust (up to a 1cm layer of paper dust) and be able
>to work in normal ambient room light (i.e., not outdoors).
>
>I prototyped a solution using a microcontroller, IR LED, and IR
>phototransistor and FSK modulation which seems to work well although I
>have not tested it yet under all of the relevant conditions (e.g.
>dust).
>
>However, a co-worker of mine pointed out that it would be nice to use
>an off-the-shelf IRDA module, which would have the side benefit of
>allowing this optical interface to be used also as a debugging port
>for the product, since IRDA would be easily capable of much higher
>data rates.
>
>I am a bit concerned about designing in IRDA, though, since I do not
>see it commonly used anymore in consumer devices. I wonder if it is
>going obsolete and may be difficult to source components for it in,
>say, 3 or 5 years from now. I searched the web and haven't found
>anything definite about the future of IRDA - wikipedia seems to
>indicate that its popularity is being revived by something called
>"irSimple" which seems to be a variant of IRDA. Also, I found articles
>which indicate that it is still widely used in consumer products in
>Japan. I found that Digikey and Mouser both seem to have plenty of
>stock of IRDA offerings from several manufacturers.
>
>What is your opinion? Is IRDA going to be around for at least 5 more
>years or is it disappearing quickly?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Sean

I wouldn't be too concerned about IRDA parts disappearing, they're fairly c=
heap, so assuming you buy
from someone that will warn you of imminent obscolesecence, , you should ge=
t enough warning to do a
lifetime buy.
Something else to consider is IR remote receivers - cheap, good for up to a=
bout 2-4kbits, tons of
range and IR remote controls aren't going away any time soon.

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