Well, I _finally_ got a build environment last night for my Shark
(by giving up and reverting to the August snapshot), so I had a
chance to play with the IR stuff on the Shark.

It was fairly easy to configure the serial port into IrDA mode,
and without any changes, the Shark will transmit IrDA fine (I see
it on my laptop without any problems).  The reception is totally
hosed, however.  I get a 0xff no matter what I send from my laptop
(however, it's one 0xff per character, so _something_ is getting
through).

I am guessing that the consumer IR demodulator is preventing the
IrDA from getting through and the only thing the Super-IO chip sees
is a "start" bit which is why it ends up with 0xff.  I think that
if you put a discrete IR detector on the IR input, it would be able
to receive IrDA fine.

I'm not sure how much I'll have a chance to play with this in the
near future, so I just wanted to let everyone know what I discovered.

BTW, Mark ... if you could send me a copy of the IR front-end
documentation for that National Super-IO chip, I might be able to
figure out which component to try out.

--Ken