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.
Hackers have been hooking up iPods for years. Apple doesn't mind it, and you don't need Apple's permission. The idea that Apple is "locked down" while others are "open" is silly.
When it comes to you, using your Apple hardware with any other hardware any way you want-- apple doesn't care. Strap C4 to both, and Apple won't care.
Just don't try and get a warranty repair after you blow it up.
What Apple does care about is people selling hardware that interfaces with its hardware. Apple wants to make sure that hardware doesn't run mains voltage across the Apple board os they get a stream of "mysteriously" dead iPhones.
Apple provides really first rate hardware support in all their Apple stores. I think a lot of people don't realize this. But they do. Often just replacing hardware if there's any debate, and even sometimes completely out of warranty.
The approval here is merely to sell an authorized accessory. If there's demand for these beyond the hobbyist market, the price will come down and others will make them.
If not, then the people who are using them don't care about spending $60. You could got to sparkfun.com or other such companies and get interface electronics to build your own in years past... this is just someone making one commercially to make it less hassle.
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.
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.
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...
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.
If you want to get an app into the App Store, you can't really use Bluetooth apart from audio and iphone-to-iphone gaming. You have frameworks for those at your disposal, but the actual Bluetooth stack isn't open.
As far as I understand this breakout cable, it should free you up a lot: You can use public frameworks to interface with the dock connector and simply send whatever you want over it to whatever you want on the other end.
it's easier, and cheaper, and more accesible to play around with a RS-232 cable... I've like 4 USB-RS232 adapters, and it's very easy to implement the protocol even on the dirtiest and cheaper chips...
You're comparing one component to a complete product.
At a minimum you'd need to add a TTL-to-RS232 converter, wiring, connectors, and I believe a proprietary "MFi" chip from Apple is required to use protocols other than the ones blessed by Apple (and surprise, the serial port profile isn't one of them)
Plus the prices I'm seeing right now show the cable is $59.00 and the Bluetooth chip is $59.95.
don't you realize that your chip is an bluetooth-serial interface?
at the end, you'll have to implement RS-232 on your microcontroller to get access from that bluetooth chip...
> Fully configurable UART
> Press the 'A' character from a terminal program on your computer and an 'A' will be pushed out the TX pin of the Bluetooth module.
Yes, they are talking about THAT terminal and THAT TX pin...
There are a lot of existing hardware devices that have RS232 connections but don't support Bluetooth. For those devices this is "better" than Bluetooth in the sense that Bluetooth isn't an option at all.
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 :-/
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.
Wait, why should a geek be appalled that Apple cares about the quality of accessories people sell?
Its not like two weeks ago, before this product, you wouldn't hook an iPhone up to an RS-232 port! You could always do that if you wanted to hack together a solution.
Apple just made it official.
And really, $60? Seems a bit high, but there's the fact that this is a specialty product for a specialty market, and realy, if you're hardware hacking the time savings of buying a working product is well worth the $60.
I truly do not understand the idea that "geeks" wouldn't love Apple. To me, geeks are either people who really love technology, or people who have very strong engineering skills. I have both. And because of both, I really appreciate Apple doesn't waste my time , money or energy with crap. Apple makes first rate products, and that means I get to spend more time geeking.
People also seem to think that Apple has everything locked down. I don't see that at all-- you can work with nonstandard hardware if you're a developer by using the Apple supplied accessory SDK. Sure, consumers-- that is to say, non-geeks,-- are kept from hurting themselves to some extent by Apple, but that's a good thing. Means I can recommend their products to my mom.
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.
Wait, did you want to hack together a solution, or sell something in the App Store?
You can run any software you want on your devices without Apple caring at all. Either your company is an enterprise licensee, or you pay your $99. Big deal.
$99 keeps the script kiddies out-- you know the ones who download iOS betas to show their friends and then complain that they managed to brick their device?
It's depressing to me that you would say something like this.
Please tell me that you don't really believe this?
$99 keeps the script kiddies out? Excuse me? I've been running software written by "script kiddies" for my entire life, to great success. It's very likely that you have too. So has the rest of the world. Most of the internet runs on software written by those meddling "script kiddies".
That computer you've got your hands in front of right now? You need to spend $99 to run a web browser on it. You also need to write the web browser yourself.
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.
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?
Do you think that econgeeker intends "script kiddie" to mean "teenage who downloads what they believe to be hacking software like back orifice or aol punters to their windows machine"?
What am I missing about the meaning of the word? The classic definition doesn't make any sense in the context of those posts.
Proprietary control (at the software or hardware level) isn't some abstract bogeyman that only Free Software Hippies need to worry about. It's a very real threat.
Except that Apple doesn't exercise any proprietary control, except if you want to sell in the App store.
If you just want to hack on your hardware, Apple doesn't care. You might void your warranty, but that's it.
Apple keeps the consumers protected, and doesn't stop the hackers.
This "very real threat" is literally an imaginary bogeyman that only "Free[1]" Software Hippies care about.
[1] So long as you use our license and only our license and never express an opinion contrary to the Chairman Richard Mao Stallman.
PS -- I've never met a real geek who thought Apple was exercising proprietary control outside of their realm. All of the people who complain about Apple like this-- that I know personally-- are not geeks who got into linux (and the "free" ideology) because it was cool, not because they're really hackers with engineering skills. But that's just my personal experience. Of course, they think they are the "real geeks" and that people who use macs use them because "they come with training wheels" and stuff like that.
>I've never met a real geek who thought Apple was exercising proprietary control outside of their realm. All of the people who complain about Apple like this-- that I know personally-- are not geeks who got into linux (and the "free" ideology) because it was cool, not because they're really hackers with engineering skills.
Is this a joke?
The real hackers are...apple fans, and the people who got into linux because they thought it was cool are all a bunch of posers?
Most Apple products, of course, are not $59 DB-9 cables. They're a bit more functional and have a bit more design appeal than that, to be fair. I'm sure you agree.
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.
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?
Apple does make it easier for everyone else willing to pay $99. You don't have to jailbreak. You just pay your $99 fee and you've got full access to run whatever software you want.
There's even an open source community of people making iOS software. They're chinned by the "open source" community because they're hacking for iOS, but they exist.
CNN or ESPN don't have to jailbreak. A big part of the problem is that you assumed they did, because the "open source" community is running around pretending like everything is locked down and you have to jailbreak to run arbitrary software. You don't, you just become a developer.
The bonus of becoming a developer is that you also get to hack on pre-release versions of the OS and stuff like that.
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!
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...
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.
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.
This is completely off topic, but you know that VOSS water? It comes from a place in Norway called Voss, about an hour from where I live. The people who live at Voss have actual VOSS water coming from their tap. True story.
To be sure, VOSS actually DOES taste much better than most other bottled water, and leagues better than tap water does in most cities. If it's worth 15 dollars might be another question. That was today's trivia fact.
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
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.
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 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.
