Comments on: IPhone Audio Breadboard Adaptor

By: Bill Schuller

Bill Schuller — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:29:14 +0000

As reported here iPhone Hacks from O'Reilly documents a method for creating a serial interface via the audio port. To be honest, I stumbled across that while searching for the guys who have a more polished commercial SDK wrapped around the same idea. Oh wel...

By: Matt John

Matt John — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:31:54 +0000

ccnp training

By: jadiaz

jadiaz — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:23:39 +0000

I had started to pursue this idea as well but got pretty busy at work. I was able to find that apple requires you to be a member of two programs. One is the iPhone dev program. This basically takes care of the software side. The other is the Made For iPod program. http://developer.apple.com/ipod/
this is where the hardware comes into play.

I wasn’t able to dig further into it because of time constraints.

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:50:16 +0000

This article is pretty interesting. I’ve been meaning for awhile to get into iPhone app development, but haven’t gotten around to it. More a hardware guy than software guy. But I might just have to play around more with my iPhone and try out what you’ve posted here.

I look forward to reading what you manage to do with the dock connector!

Also, this a bit off-topic, but I noticed the Owon O-scope pictured above, and was wondering what you thought of their scopes. I’ve been looking for a decently prices digital scope for awhile, and would really like to hear the opinions of someone who has actually used one of these Owon models.

By: Berni

Berni — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:35:54 +0000

That is a interesting idea to use the audio port for data transfer. I dont see why it couldn’t be done at a fairly nice speed too.

There is a better trick on doing this tho. The Bluetooth stack often has a serial port in it. There is a certain chip from National Semi that gives you a RS232 to bluetooth bridge. That means you can communicate wirelessly trough bluetooth at a few Mbit, while being as simple as having a real RS232 port on the phone. If you are interested i could tell you more, since its a amazing chip that needs 0 exetrnal components (even internal antenna) to turn bluetooth in to a RS232 port

Do not know how easy it is to use a bluetooth serial port on the iphone but it was easy as pie on my WM6.0 pocketpc as the virtual com port was accessed the same way you would access a real physical com port on a PC (Only a few lines of code to make it work)

By: admin

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:30:11 +0000

@Dan… I’m fairly sure we can use the audio input/output as I described. The bad part is that without jail breaking you have to pay Apple to get any software running on the IPhone. Maybe we can do an App for the store that enables basic comunications to the IPhone/Arduino via WiFi. Keep it super simple. This way anyone could get that app and then write code in Processing to control it remotely. I know this is not really like running a program on the IPhone but it might be easier to develop. Jail broke phones will work great though.

I was hoping to see better access to the serial port and a blue tooth serial connection. I do believe 3.0 has made interfacing easier. I am exploring IPhone dev now and hope to find out soon. Anyone doing some I/O work with new IPhone OS want to do an article?

By: admin

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:24:03 +0000

@Aldrin… I knew there was some way to pick and hang up calls, figured it was by shorting one of the signals to ground. I will certainly look into that. Do you have a link to some more information to share?

By: Dan Watts

Dan Watts — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:37:29 +0000

This is a clever, overlooked way of interfacing hardware with an iPhone. It doesn’t require jailbreaking or any hardware modification to the iPhone. (I thought OS 3 was supposed to make it easier to interface hardware through the dock port, but I haven’t seen anything new of that sort yet).

I love your idea of using it to interface with an Arduino without the need of a PC – if you can pull that off, it will open the door to a lot of new uses for the iPhone (though most of them would likely require jailbreaking).

The “iPhone Hacks” book by O’Reilly describes a couple of projects that use the audio jack or external microphone for serial communication – an IR controller and an external keyboard. The latter, in particular, is quite a worthwhile project.

This book lists a source for a 4-pole audio jack splitter — ” 4-pole Y-splitter from Radtech (part number 13757 from http://radtech.us/products/iPhoneCables.aspx), the ProCableAudio Y Cable Splitter 3.5 mm” — but I couldn’t find any sign of it at that web site. Given their prices, I suspect it would be quite expensive to buy. If the Curious Inventor offers a 4-pole splitter for sale I’ll definitely buy one or two!

Dan.

By: Aldrin Leal

Aldrin Leal — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:31:56 +0000

Actually, the iPhone Mic also has a Remote – works with some ipods as well – playback/pause, forward, rewind, volume up and down.

Have you looked into that?