IR Beacon

Great progress today.  I will look forward to your writeup.  I looked at the beacon on my scope.  Sorry about the poor quality of the pictures.  I think that the beacon is just sending "001001001" etc.  Here is what I see on the screen.  There is a carrier signal with a period of about 18 us.  This corresponds to a frequency of about 56 Khz(Which makes sense since this is a 56khz beacon.)  On top of that I see two short pulses followed by one long. 

There appears to be a lot of noise in this image due to aliasing with the carrier.   Below is a zoom in on the pulses.  The smaller pulse has a pulse width of about 1.4ms and the longer pulse has a width of 2.4ms.  Looking at the vishay datasheet: 

I have usually use the sony protocol which uses a different set of pulse widths. (1.2 ms for 0 and 1.8 ms for 1.)  Take a look at this page for an explanation:

http://users.telenet.be/davshomepage/sony.htm

PS:

Here is a nice overview of how IR remotes work:
http://www.sbprojects.com/knowledge/ir/ir.htm

Ok, I think I found what the pololu beacon is using. It appears that the pololu beacon is using what looks like the RCA protocol! Here is a link to the description:
http://www.sbprojects.com/knowledge/ir/rca.htm

I have a couple of universal remotes that will produce this protocol, so with any luck it should be pretty straightforward to drive the blimp with the IR remote! (A worthy project I think) This would require no additional hardware or weight on the balloon.