Last night (March 2, 2010), I ran a test with the door minder circuit. The separation between the encoder and decoder was 365cm (approx 11.98ft), and the encoder was being toggled at 20Hz. This means the expected signal from the decoder should be around 10Hz because the decoder changes every time the encoder sees a high signal. A signal was produced, but it was not nearly a consistent 10Hz. Unfortunately, in trying to adjust the LED, I broke one of the wires off, and, of course, lost the signal. Eyeballing it, I would say the decoder picked up 3 or 4 in every 20 toggles from the encoder.
Previously, the experiment was ran with both chips on the same board with both the LED and transceiverpointing towards a mirror. A signal was produced, but last night, I realized this was a reflection of of my shirt/hand. I believe the LED is not focused enough. The current through the LED in both cases was around 45mA (I didn’t have a chance to test it with anything lower before I broke the LED). I am, of course open to any ideas on how to proceed.