code, circuits, & construction

hc gilje posted some useful notes on accessing the serial ports of an iPhone. Bottom line:

Apple has not made it easy to let the iphone communicate with external devices. Basically, you need a jailbroken phone to do anything.

That said, his notes are useful for anyone who’s really really got to get at the serial port.

Other ways of getting sensors into the iPhone include Tellart’s NADAMobile, which uses the microphone input as an analog input, and Brian Jepson’s PhoneGap solution, which uses ethernet and an ethernet shield.

Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.  It’s a nifty little board.  You attach a DC motor and the board can an output voltage when the motor is turned,  and analog signals telling you the direction and speed of the motor.  It turns a DC motor into a rotary encoder, of sorts.

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