Wireless communication using infrared light has many advantages over the traditional mess of cables. This goes not only for PCs and laptops, but even for the humble microcontroller.In particular, it is easier to set up communications with handheld PDA-style computers using infrared than using the RS232 interface. Some newer machines such as the Palm Zire do not even have an external RS232 interface and instead use a USB port for communications with a PC and an IrDA port to talk to other PDAs, mobile phones and other devices. It therefore seems a good idea to equip microcontroller systems such as the Elektor Electronics 89S8252 Flash Microcontroller Board (December 2001) with an IrDA interface.