Do You have any tips!
Application:
10 trucks are continiously weighing aluminium on two weighing stations. We plan to mount one panel PC at each weighing station.

The communication against the keyboard will be at a distance og 0,5 - 1,5 metres wireless.
Must ensure not to influence on the other PC 5 meteres apart. All must have the same frequency of course. IR or RF.

I case of RF communication, there must be a kind of shielding between the to PC's ??
One alternative is to use standard IR keyboards, but then you are limited to a few office like keybords, and they must all have the same frequency. I want to use a numeric Industrial keybord.

I think the solution must be a wireless extension of a keyboard cable. Then we can select amongst several standard industry keyboards.

 

If weight and dimensions are not an issue, you may consider the use of *industrial* IR serial transmitter/receiver to set-up an optical RS232
line. Otherwise you may use industrial radiomodems. Then buy an industrial keyboard equipped with RS232 serial output.

On your PC you must write some software to read the keys from the serial port and send commands to your application, but rather being a problem this can be a double advantage:

1) you can filter the keys and operations of the remote keyboard (the user will not be able, for example, to shutdown the PC or activate any other task)

2) you can operate on your PC both remotely via RS232 and locally by the system keyboard.

If these last features are not desired, you can ask the keyboard manufacturer if he can provide also an inverse protocol converter (from RS232 to PS/2) to be connected to the keyboard input of the PC.

regards
Luca Gallina