Patent Application
20060058016
The present invention relates to a wireless projector and particularly to a projector equipped with embedded download server.
Projectors are quite popular these days, and have gradually shown up in people's life. With the technology of wireless local area network (wireless LAN) well developed, many wireless projectors have been developed and introduced on the market. These days when users do presentation, they do not have to connect the client device (such as a notebook computer or PDA) to the projector with an image transport line. Instead, through a wireless network, image signals output from the client device can be directly transmitted to the projector. Not only the wiring problem of the image transport line may be eliminated, one set of notebook computer can simultaneously transmit signals to a plurality of projectors to do presentation concurrently.
However, for linking the wireless projector, the client device has to install transport software and wireless projector driver, and the wireless LAN has to link the wireless communication module of the wireless projector to transmit the image signals to the wireless projector. As every wireless projector vendor has its own communication technology and software, for users who have to go to different locations, to setup matching transport software and driver for each wireless projector in advance is a troublesome task. Moreover, the driver is generally stored in an optical disk, but many optical disk drives of the present notebook computers are connected externally. If users forget to prepare the optical disk drive, the driver cannot be installed, and the wireless projector becomes useless. If a PDA is used, the software cannot be installed through the optical disk. Then the wireless connecting function is useless.
The primary object of the present invention is to provide a wireless projector that allows a client device to instantly download transport software and driver without pre-installation to realize wireless transport operation.
To achieve the foregoing object, the invention has an embedded server built in the wireless projector. The server contains pre-loaded transport software and driver. The embedded server supports Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) function and has a built-in wireless communication module that conforms to a standard wireless transport protocol to perform wireless communication with the client device that also equips with a wireless communication module so that the client device can instantly download the transport software and driver of the wireless projector. Hence any client device that equips with the wireless communication module can directly download the transport software and driver resided in the wireless projector through a wireless communication approach without pre-installation to accomplish wireless communication with the wireless projector.
Another object of the invention is to provide a wireless projector to facilitate software updating. Administrators can perform software update or upgrade for the wireless projector by uploading the software through the wireless communication approach to improve operation convenience.
To achieve the object set forth above, the wireless projector equipped with embedded download server of the invention has a rewritable memory unit. Thus the administrators can update or upgrade the software of the projector.
The foregoing, as well as additional objects, features and advantages of the invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.
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Take wireless LAN IEEE 802.11b specification for example. It defines two types of wireless network operation modes, namely, Ad hoc mode and infrastructure mode. In the Ad hoc mode (also called point to point mode), the clients can directly communicate with each other (without using wireless access point). In the infrastructure mode, different client devices have to communicate with each other through a wireless access point. According to this specification, when the wireless communication module of a client device 20 (such as a notebook PC or PDA) is activated, it scans (searches) the wireless frequencies where it is located to find the wireless access point and other wireless clients under the Ad hoc mode. If the wireless clients are preset in the infrastructure mode, the wireless communication module will select a linking wireless access point. This process is generally accomplished through a wireless adapter contained in the wireless communication module. Such a selection is automatically accomplished through a Service Set Identifier (SSID) and signal power and detected error information. Then the wireless communication module switches to a designated channel of the selected wireless access point to coordinate use of ports. The process set forth above is called establishing link.
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According to the embodiments of the invention, the server communication module 30 is not limited to be used only in the wireless LAN. Any other wireless communication techniques that can achieve the communication object may be used, such as Blue tooth communication technique, infrared communication technique (IrDA), and the like. Similarly, the wire communication module mentioned above may be realized through a transmitter adapter such as an interface conforming to specifications of USB or IEEE 1384 or the like to provide connection ports for the client device.
Hence any client device that has a wireless communication module can directly download the transport software and driver resided in the wireless projector through the wireless communication approach and install without pre-installing them, thereby to achieve wireless communication with the wireless projector. To provide file transport server of different transport protocols, the embedded download server may be a HTTP server, FTP server or TFTP server.
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While the preferred embodiments of the invention have been set forth for the purpose of disclosure, modifications of the disclosed embodiments of the invention as well as other embodiments thereof may occur to those skilled in the art. Accordingly, the appended claims are intended to cover all embodiments which do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention.
