Phone peripherals powered by audio jack • Hacker News Board

Re: Phone peripherals powered by audio jack

#11

Post by sudont » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 7:58 PM UTC

zbowling wrote: post #8

Only have to do this because the accessory kit in iOS is so locked down and Apple wraps that mess up in their "Works for iPhone" program. The dock connector has full serial bus for accessories with power. It's easy to program and build accessories. No weird hacks converting to analog and then doing software signal processing and generating power with continuous tone. Apple just locks it down from developers getting a…

03/15/2011: Google donates Android phones to the project.

02/18/2011: Microsoft donates Windows Phone 7 phones to the project.

Cheap, multi-platform sensors. With a little tweaking, I assume they could transmit data over a phone line. This means you don’t have to build for any specific target platform: any no-name, off-brand phone in some Harare phone shop can record data.

What happens when we bake these into a toxin module, and distribute them to people in LDCs? It’ll be a lot easier to start seeing evidence and location of toxic spills, chemical safety violations, whatever.

A cheap platform shouldn’t be hampered by any specific pathway: we’re building a parasite here, people.

Re: Phone peripherals powered by audio jack

#12

Post by tobylane » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 8:36 PM UTC

It says Phone peripherals, not iPhone. It says audio jack, not 30-pin connector. It doesn't seem like everyone is glad we have a multi-platform smartphone connection, why? Even Micro-usb is bulkier than this.

Re: Phone peripherals powered by audio jack

#13

Post by pclark » Sat, Apr 09, 2011, 9:22 AM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #10

pclark wrote: post #9

How much could you do with this? Also, why does Apple allow Square into the app store when it does this?

The Square unit uses the headphone jack. It exchanges data through tones being sent back and forth over the speaker and microphone pins. Since there are no unpublished APIs being used, no App Store terms are being violated. You can do a lot when you can send and receive serial data over a port. Millions upon millions of devices that you never see or know about communicate in this very manner.

like what devices? not doubting, just curious

Re: Phone peripherals powered by audio jack

#14

Post by joezydeco » Sat, Apr 09, 2011, 12:47 PM UTC

pclark wrote: post #13

joezydeco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Square unit uses the headphone jack. It exchanges data through tones being sent back and forth over the speaker and microphone pins. Since there are no unpublished APIs being used, no App Store terms are being violated. You can do a lot when you can send and receive serial data over a port. Millions upon millions of devices that you never see or know about communicate in this very manner.

like what devices? not doubting, just curious

Your home is filled with microprocessors that talk to each other over two-wire serial protocols. Your oven probably has a control panel that talks over I2C or some other serial protocol to a control module.

That credit card terminal on the shop counter has a modem that talks to another computer the old-fashioned way: frequency-keyed tones over a phone line.

Your car has more chips than you think, all talking over a shared serial bus like CAN or DBUS (not the desktop protocol, the Bosch one).

That touchscreen on your smart phone communicates with the host processor over a serial protocol.

In the embedded systems world it's cheaper and easier to use these ancient protocols than to try and install ethernet lines and TCP/IP stacks...just so that your oven can start a bake cycle.