On 02/18/05 19:05 ET, automan1 said...
There won't be any interference form having two
emitters (floods) in one room.
The reasons you've been given against it are ridiculous
and not based in reality.
Well, no. (Yes they are.) (No, they're not.) Et cetera.
IR is light of a frequency we do not see, so we do not understand whether it will or will not bounce off of surfaces that we see visible light reflecting from. If you have ANY floods in a room where the output of a flood will reach the sensor (pickup), you could easily have feedback, meaning the flood would turn on solid or with some high-frquency oscillation, and the sensor would simply be picking that up and sending it to the flood. Over and over.
Walking through the room, IR reflections off of you might make this start, or might stop it if it occurs. So might raising or lowering a shade.
The small emitters guarantee that there will not be so much IR bouncing around that feedback will start. They are ugly and it is not easy to put them inside some gear. The little prisms do indeed increase lateral sensitivity of components, but if they do not ACTUALLY work in your situation, you have no solution.
I'm going to look at the other responses now and see if I have other comments.
Ah, yes, just one other thing; the other posts covered everything else. And this is only a picky detail for understanding the facts behind the behaviour.
On 02/19/05 04:46 ET, David Anderson said...
This means that using even one repeating flood
emitter will result in some components receiving
a signal from both the remote itself and the repeater
(perhaps with a time delay that might cause a
double action for, say, volume increase or channel
increment?).
Twenty years ago nobody would have considered time delay at all. Your signals are light and electricity, and electricity goes almost as fast as light, and light goes, well, just as fast as light! There cannot be any delays in a system that just converts from light to electricity to RF to electricity to light...that will be large enough for any of your equipment to notice it. I think I figured this out once as a lark and found that if one degree of phase shift would be a problem, your living room would have to be several hundred feet long for there to be a problem. And it would probably take at least thirty degrees of phase shift. That means double actions are impossible.
But today we are used to seeing signals processed digitally, and also sent up 25,000 miles and then back the same amount (roughly 1/4 to 1/3 the distance light travels in a second), so we have seen and heard delays.
The layout of my room also makes
it very likely that the receiver that drives any
flood emitter will see the output of these floods
and the warning about feedback therefore seems
highly plausible.
Both these potential issues (i.e. double signals
and feedback) seem equally relevant even if I
used an RF solution.
Well, yes, if you use floods with the RF. The powermid idea that you tried has floods, but they are more like just heavy rains; they put out a lot of IR compared to a regular emitter, but nothing like a real flood. You are not likely to have feedback with them. But as you found, they are flaky.
The RF solution is classically (and also in some baroque and rococo A/V systems, not to mention the romantic ones) used with small emitters, so we are back to the little guys that fall off all the time, or putting them inside.
Don't put a flood inside a component because too much IR can overwhelm the IR circuits and commands will work apparently randomly.
This message was edited by Ernie Bornn-Gilman on 03/05/05 03:36 ET.
