In the June, July and August 2008 issues of SILICON CHIP we described the DSP Musicolour, an advanced light show based on the dsPIC30F4011 microcontroller from Microchip.

The component (upper) side of the PC board is the less interesting side - IC1 and the infrared receiver/transmitter are mounted on the other (copper) side.

We mentioned that the firmware supports a high speed UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter).

The PC board below (which in fact can replace the September infrared remote control PC board) adds an IrDA (Infrared Data Association) compatible serial port for the DSP Musicolour.

This gives you all the features the original remote control offered but adds a huge amount of additional features via the serial port of your PC.

Although the firmware in the DSP Musicolour supports a high speed UART running at up to 1.84Mbps, this interface will run at the much slower baud rate of 9.6Kbps, which is the default baud rate of the DSP Musicolour.

There is little need for it to be higher as 9.6Kbps should be fast enough for most applications (if you wish to use a higher baud rate, you could connect a wired serial port).