I was brainstorming today and thought up the idea of "sharing" the GPS unit I installed in my car with my Pocket PC, using the Empeg's IrDA port. The advantage of this would be I could use some of the nicer programs that are available for the Pocket PC with the GPS I have installed in my car. I also wouldn't have to fuss with or buy stupid non-standard serial cables to connect the GPS directly to my Pocket pc.

Now someone correct me if I'm wrong:
This seems like it should be a simple since, to Linux, and the pocket pc the IrDA ports are just standard serial ports. So I just need a daemon in the empeg to dump everything coming across the sled serial port to it's IrDA port right? The more I read about IrDA on linux though the more I get confused. Is this really as simple as getting IrDA setup on the empeg and then writing a program to read /dev/ssttyXX and write /dev/ssttyYY?

To get the GPS data out the IR port, you *could* use IrCOMM (serial over IrDA), but Cushman's worked on this and said it's not very reliable.

The easier way would be to split the incoming serial data into discrete messages and use IrOBEX to send one message at a time out the IR port. I believe one of the goals of Empire was to allow bi-directional IR traffic. You'll prolly wanna talk to Cushman and ask what you need to do so you can write a module for Empire.

IrCOMM is what you would be using but it is kind of broken on the kernel version that the Empeg uses (2.2). The whole IrDA stack is out of date, and needs to be brought up to the level that the 2.4 and 2.5 kernels are at. This is something I am looking into at a later date after I get some more work done on the Palm app I am writing (60% finished) and a very very simple Empire IrDA server to listen for the OBEX objects to support the Palm app.

Right now there would be problems with dropped connections if you tried to use it for an extended period of time I believe.

I want to get something working and usable for the Palm playlist creator (Palantir) and the IrDA listener (Empire) and then work on improving it and supporting other apps.