

Phone peripherals powered by audio jack - rvanrooy
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/

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zbowling
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 access unless you follow
their strict guidelines. One of which is that your accessory works for iPhone
and only iPhone and not multiple devices. They also have licensing fees
involved. It's arbitrary.

The also do this same program for Bluetooth. They claimed custom protocols at
WWDC a few years ago that gave me hope I could connect to common bluetooth
devices (like a laptops and my Lego NXT device). Entirely not the case.

~~~
sudont
_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.

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joezydeco
Why can't the same "hobbyist" effort that's applied to breaking the handshake
and encryption on Playstations and Xboxes be applied to reverse-engineering
Apple's peripheral chip?

~~~
yardie
It has already been hacked. Basically a voltage drop across 2 pins IIRC.

EDIT: More than 2 pins, actually. According this guide
<http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml>, depending on the type
of device you want to emulate(charger, stereo dock, etc.) you'll need to
either short or drop the voltage on different pins.

~~~
joezydeco
The way to hack in a charger against the "this charger not supported" has been
known a while.

I'm talking about the data connection on the iPod/iPhone docking connector.
You can't access the dock API unless you're an approved Apple "Made for iPod"
vendor and purchase special chips from Apple that handshake between your
docking peripheral and the device.

Hacking power is one thing, but it's useless unless you can move data in and
out of the device. Using the headphone jack to move data with FSK is clever
but slow and not very robust.

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inoop
Alternatively: <http://code.google.com/p/microbridge/>,
<http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585>,
<http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331>, [http://robots-
everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=PropBri...](http://robots-
everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=PropBridge)

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tobylane
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.

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corin_
Seen before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104408>

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

~~~
joezydeco
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.

~~~
pclark
like what devices? not doubting, just curious

~~~
joezydeco
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.

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chopsueyar
Hasn't been updated since March 5th.

