HP 50G - Any way to increase the IR TX/RX range?

[Martin Hepperle]

(09-17-2015 01:01 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  The 48 series machines use an older IR technology which goes by many names, most commonly Red-Eye. It was designed for more casual consumer use, so the range and angle are more flexible.

The 50g uses IRDA, a later standard which generally supported higher transfer rates (though not much higher on these machines), better auto-negotiation of data-rates, etc. but in many products they reduced useful range in order to meet these other parameters. It's unlikely you can do anything to change this enough to make a difference.

The HP50g is an extremely versatile machine when it comes to I/O. For printing you can use RedEye for the 82240 but also IrDA for other devices. In both cases range is rather limited, though. The cleanest way to improve the range without modifying the calculator would be a transceiver box which would boost IR signals, but such a device does not exist, as far as I know. A pass-through transceiver should be fairly easy to design for someone with some background in electronics (who wants to start another small project?).

For the various ways of I/O on the 48/49/50 series machines see the attached scheme.

Martin