On 07/07/2019 09:12, Rob Morley wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 22:40:25 +0100
Steve Walker wrote:

Way back around 2001, we had an HP Ipaq with a GPS receiver sleeve

I have a slightly newer one that has the GPS built in - great little
devices for the time.

(it cost around a £900 IIRC. One of the apps on it was a remote
control (Nevo I think), which could be set up for whatever you needed.

I have often thought that it is a great pity that mobile phones
dropped the IR transmitter. There is so much that you could use that
for.

You can get USB or Bluetooth IR transmitters to use with phones that
don't have IR built in (a few still do, I think).

Yes. I've seen them, but the USB ones don't seem a good idea. They'd end
up on the wrong end of most phones, stick out enough to get damaged or
cause damage to the phone if left in and will add wear to the socket as
they have to be taken out for charging the phone each day - my son has
already had two phones fail from the extra stress of using them on the
bus while connected via a cable to a powerbank.

Bluetooth gets around that, but would require them dotted all over the
place (we'd need a eight dotted around for various TVs, hi-fi, sound
systems, etc. and, in two cases, probably two in the same room. Not all
would be easy to position where they would work well. Anyway, I'm not
sure how well a phone would cope with 8 different bluetooth IR devices,
all in range at the same time - and if it can, how you'd avoid operating
two devices of the same make and model in different rooms at the same
time? Can more than one phone be connected to the same bluetooth device
at the same time, as there'd be five phones in the house at once?

The point and shoot ability of a phone with IR at the right end would be
so much simpler. I presume they took them out to save space, as I would
have thought them something that so many people would find useful these
days.

The better option is probably wi-fi to IR devices. Much more likely to
accept multiple phones at once and to be able to direct control for a
specific device to only that IR blaster. I don't know whether that is
the case or not, so I'll have to look into it.

SteveW