

Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple - dholowiski
http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MSRP01&Click=85531&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Maker+Shed+Jul+21+2011&utm_content=Maker+Shed+Jul+21+2011+CID_5d19bd49d4c9737785f05cd1d70cd693&utm_source=Email+Campaign&utm_term=cable

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mcantelon
Hilarious that Apple has to "allow" you to use one piece of hardware you own
with another. Only in the world of Apple would a $60 serial cable be news.

~~~
blantonl
we'll see that cable show up on Ebay for $3.99 USD in a matter of a few
months.

~~~
runjake
Last I heard, the cable uses some proprietary Apple chip that does some sort
of authentication. I could be wrong.

~~~
jrockway
If only there was some country with good electronics copying abilities and no
regard for intellectual property...

~~~
econgeeker
The prevalence of off brand cables that work with these devices make me wonder
about the allegations of a proprietary crypto chip.

I use modern iOS devices and the worst that's happened to me is one would
claim that something wasn't an "authorized" cable when I plugged it into a USB
port that didn't provide enough current. (plugging it into one that does--
totally off brand USB power plug) works, though.

~~~
jrockway
The crypto chip lets the iOS device use some alternate signaling protocol over
the dock connector. Charging is unrelated.

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ScotterC
Congrats to these guys. I tried working in the Made for iPod (MFI) program to
build hardware devices and it's a really tough process to get Apple to open up
a little.

This might open the pipeline for a lot of innovation.

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KeithMajhor
Why is this better than Bluetooth? All the iOS devices have it and there are
breakout boards with RS232. There are even some that are cheaper than this
cable...

~~~
marvin
Forgive me if this is an ignorant reply, but I thought the point of this was
to give developers the ability to make official, Apple-approved apps that
interface with devices that communicate across serial. Things like industrial
machinery, GPS loggers etc. I've actually been looking around for something
like this in order to make an iPhone application to use as a flight computer
with gliders, since all glider-approved GPS loggers (which are MUCH more
accurate than the iPhone's built-in GPS) communicate via a serial connection.
If I understand correctly, until now you would have to use a jailbroken iPhone
in order to do this?

Is there an easy way you can use Bluetooth to solve the same problem? Please
correct me if I'm missing something here.

~~~
sebastianavina
is more an interface to play around with your ipod and Legos and alike...

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mad_snowman
This is the most preposterous breakout cable I've ever seen. $59 for the two
connectors and a cable?

~~~
st3fan
You pay the Apple tax if you make a device like this. You will also need to
license a chip from Apple that does some crypto to validate your device and
you will have to buy the connector from a specific vendor that is blessed by
Apple.

It all adds up.

I love how Google is letting the market go crazy with their recently announced
external accessory APIs. That is what Apple should have done. Of course it is
highly incompaitble with their tight control on anything iOS related :-/

~~~
geoka9
You would think that at least geeks would be appalled by Apple and avoid their
products because of this. But every geek I know (save one or two) is raving
about their Apple gadgets.

~~~
blhack
You can make that three geeks.

I got pretty upset earlier this week. I wanted to do a site-survey of the
wireless network that covers my company's campus.

The iPad is a _wonderful_ tool for this, you'd think. It has a wifi chip, and
a GPS. What I wanted was to drive around and pair signal strengths with GPS
locations.

Except I can't do this on my iPad because Apple doesn't want me to. The API
for getting wifi signal strength is off limits, and utilizing it will keep you
out of the app store, which is the only legitimate pathway to getting
applications onto the device. They've built the tricorder from star trek...but
they've locked it inside of a box and won't let anybody use it.

This is _absurd_ to me. Here apple has this really wonderful piece of hardware
that is packed full of all kinds of sensors and things, and they're telling me
that I can only use them for playing silly games? What the hell is that?

I ended up still doing the site survey, I even used apple hardware to do it,
but the amount of hoops I had to jump through[1] was stupid.

[1]: I wrote a few lines of javascript that pulled GPS data from the
geolocation api, and then called an ajax script to log this info into a mysql
database with a timestamp.

I then ran a script on my laptop that polled
System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport,
and parsed the output for signal strength.

This got logged into another file, with a timestamp.

It was a simple matter to mesh these files together, and generate a KML file
for google earth.

Now...this is all accessible to me because I'm a hacker; it should be
accessible to _everybody_ , and it shouldn't require that amount of duct tape
and chicken wire.

~~~
YooLi
What are you talking about? You can write whatever you want for your device.
You just can't sell whatever you want in Apple's store, but that is something
completely different that using whatever API you want.

Edit: 1. I don't think you know what a script-kiddie is, 2. Your replies make
no sense to the context of any msgs you are replying to.

~~~
blhack
Do you write your own kernel patches? Who wrote your userland?

Software is about _communities_ and if you don't know this, you haven't been
paying attention for the last 30 years.

Software is about standing on the shoulders of the people who came before you.
If every developer has to write their own stack, and every developer has to
pay $99 for the right to do so, we'd still be in the 70s.

How the hell do people honestly think that this is a valid excuse?

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philfreo
Off-topic, but their analytics for email conversion rates are going to be way
off due to this post on HN:

utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Maker+Shed+Jul+21+2011

~~~
bradleyland
Yes and no. Advertisers want to know how well a particular program performs,
even if it's by referral. When examining their performance in Google
Analytics, and noticing that their conversion rate is atypical, they'll likely
end up looking for traffic sources. Once they do that, they'll see the high
number of visitors from news.ycombinator.com, and the mystery will be solved.

~~~
panacea
...or someone in the chain will benefit from saying "see how well our email
campaign worked?".

~~~
jimktrains2
But it did, didn't it? By sending that email that got x people to look at the
page.

If it were a store having a sale, they would consider it a win if people
shared the sale flyer and enticed more people to come.

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cdcarter
I hope that this can lead to a cool system of iPad driven arduinos!

~~~
davidcann
How about an iPad robot running on an Arduino (we made it):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BXM9PYaXY0>

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runjake
This has been out for a while.

Here's an accompanying serial terminal app (that only works with network
devices, for some reason) in the App Store:

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/get-console/id412067943?mt=8>

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ddw
It would be interesting if Cisco will take advantage of this in any way to
allow the control of their networking devices. Not that it's too hard to plug
in with an old laptop, but still, the iPad is convenient.

It's a little confusing to me why Apple makes it so hard for people to use
their devices in customer specific ways like this cable. I read a while back
that TV networks like CNN and ESPN were using iPads to control on-air graphics
in near real time. They're huge companies they can afford the custom
engineering to jailbreak the devices and to write custom apps. But why doesn't
Apple make it easier for everyone else?

~~~
lukeschlather
People use old laptops, as I understand it, because the USB adapters aren't
incredibly reliable at acting like a real serial port.

I can't imagine that the emulation this does would be more stable than USB
adapters that have had years to iron out the kinks.

~~~
YooLi
The iPhone has serial lines in the 30-pin port. This just gives you access to
them. No USB-serial emulation.

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clumsysmurf
From the features section, it says "Enables development of iOS apps for
private use in homes, schools and offices"

Is it possible to also use this for non-private apps - that is - apps
submitted to the App Store?

~~~
econgeeker
Yes, it is. The iOS Accessory SDK is public. You'd just be making an App that
relies on people having this hardware already.

This works for hardware manufacturers who make iOS accessories and then want
to ship an App to work with it (which is the general case of the cable.)

But you could, for instance, make an arduino hacking kit that lets you talk
over the cable to a board, and sell that as an App in the AppStore.

That text communicates to me that it comes with no software to drive it and
you'll have to write your own, and there are no assumptions about the hardware
on the other side, but you could use it to work with an arduino.

Seems like this is the perfect piece of hardware to go with open sourced iOS
software for doing development with the arduino.

Imagine being able to re-program your Arduino powered robot in the field from
your iOS device!

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noonespecial
Android: The $49/Night hotel with the free continental breakfast and free
wifi. (But there might be roaches in the rooms)

Ipad: The $349/Night hotel that charges you $25 if you open the little fridge
and $45/hour for the wifi that never quite works. (But the elevators have
chrome, move fast and are never out of order. No roaches.)

There's no reason in the world that a $350 room shouldn't come with free wifi
and snacks when a $50 one does, but they never do. Watch out, that bottle of
VOSS is $15...

~~~
econgeeker
I don't understand this comparison. Android tablets have not proven to be
cheaper than the iPad (adjusting for screen size).

It is true that this cable is overpriced, but that is simply because there
isn't a big demand for serial cables, and thus only one company (so far) has
made one.

Apple's "approval" process is like the approval process for the appstore--
they just want to make sure stuff isn't going to take you to the back alley
and mug you. Roach motels don't care.

So, I'd say, iPad is $49/night, with a deluxe breakfast, optical internet, and
nobody takes you in the back alley and mugs you.

~~~
noonespecial
Yikes. Sorry. iphone. I didn't mean to cast it into the light of tablets
specifically.

In this case, arduino (serial) interfaces for android devices are varied and
extremely cheap. It wasn't possible at all on istuff until now, and only now
with about $50 worth of rent-seeking added on.

istuff is usually top shelf. It just reminded me of another place where I've
seen top shelf stuff nickle and dime its users in ridiculous ways despite the
fact that they paid a great deal more for what should be a better experience.

Don't downvote parent please. He's got a valid point. My bad.

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mad_snowman
So does anyone know if there's a conversion chip in there or whether the
standard iPhone connector has a serial pin on it. I seem to remember someone
hooking up a GPS to the iPhone 2 and plugging serial straight on. There are
already a number of breakout plugs out there, so I'd be surprised if this
opens up radical new innovation.

As a side note, other people have used the audio jack for I/O, like the iPhly
Remote Control or Square

~~~
st3fan
It has serial on the connector. It is 3.3V TTL level so you will need a
converter to turn it into 'real' serial.

If you jailbreak a device you can access this port without any problems and do
cool stuff.

Just be sure to properly buffer and convert the signals. You don't want to
kill your device.

Sparkfun sells connectors in a breakout board. So does DealExtreme I think.

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kylek
> Supports communication at speeds up to 57.6 Kbps.

Is that a technical limitation or typo? Many devices use 115.2 Kbps if I'm not
mistaken

~~~
st3fan
If I remember correctly, your device does not actually get full serial port
access. Instead Apple provides a protocol made up of data packets that you can
send to and from your device.

These packets must be signed by a little crypto chip that you have to license
from Apple.

Yes, very tight control.

A device like this is not simply a cable. It actually contains a little micro-
controller that reads and writes Apple's serial packets on one end and turns
it into real RS232 serial on the other end.

So there is overhead. Enough for the speed to drop down considerably.

~~~
econgeeker
You're making an assumption that he overhead is the cause of the speed.

There's no serial port on the iOS device connector. So it isn't really as you
represent.

The iOS device connector has a USB client port. This requires the other side
of the connector to be a USB host. Thus to make this cable ,they have to put
in a little micro controller that has a USB host port (which many of them
don't since micro controllers are more likely found in devices than in hosts,
hosts are usually PCs and laptops, etc.)

And then that host micro controller talks to a RS-232 serial chip (or has a
serial port integrated to it).

Its possible that to save money that micro controller is slow enough that
talking to USB at 12mbit/s takes up most of its time since this is likely done
in software, and it can only flip the bits for the RS-232 at 57k. In fact,
they might not even have an RS-232 port on it and they might be simply
literally flipping generic IO pins up and down to produce and RS-232
compatible interface.

Would have to reverse engineer it to know.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
_There's no serial port on the iOS device connector._

<http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml>

More than likely, this device is NOT emulating a serial port via USB.

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hnbla
Would be great with something similar but with canbus instead of rs232. The
ipad seems like the ideal device to just hook up to the bus for quick
monitoring.

