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.
