Infrared Instant Messenger 6.111 Introductory Digital Systems Laboratory Final Project

The Infrared Instant Messenger system al ows two users to communicate text messages to one another across a large room. Each user controls a communications module and uses a keyboard to input, monitor to display, and IR transmitter and receiver to communicate textual data to the partner's module that is located across the room. The user types text using a keyboard and transmits it in real-time using IR. The user sees two text display windows on a TV monitor, the lower window displaying text that he is typing and the upper window displaying text that he is receiving from his partner via IR. This dual-window text display system emulates popular computer instant messenger software such as AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. The Infrared Instant Messenger system allows for real-time, two-way s multaneous data transmission so that both users can type text at the same time and receive messages from one another. The system is divided up into two subsystems. Ji Zhang worked on the Keyboard/IR Input/Output Subsystem and Philip Guo worked on the Video Subsystem. Philip and Ji worked together to design a data interface protocol to connect their two subsystems and to integrate and debug the entire system in order to make it fully- funct onal The Infrared Instant Messenger system worked properly and successfully exhibited all functionality that we originally intended for it to perform. l