Chief Delphi - IR Sensors

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- - IR Sensors (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=60816)

Quote:

It is normally not a good electrical practice to directly wire 2 outputs together ... as one of them can drive a signal into the other. It can be especially damaging if the INPUT that they are connected to has a high impedance.

You can look at a techniquie called wire OR'ing. You wire two or more outputs together, but not directly as you indicated. It can be done with steering diodes, for example: tie all four outputs together through a wire OR into a single interrupt (port B pin). Each pin could also be directly tied to a generic digital input pin. Interrupt fires, then interrupt code reads the generic inputs. The purpose would to tie up only 1 interrupt pin.

The First documentation says this device is an implementation of the aTinyIR2 device. The schematic for the TinyIR2 shows a PIC controller and implies that the outputs come from some tri-state pins on the controller. As such there is no way to know whether it is safe to "OR" the outputs of several boards together with simple wiring. It might be OK to use diodes but I am not sure it is worth the frustration of trying to troubleshoot two boards and get them working together.

http://www.tauntek.com/TinyIR2-schematic.pdf