Hi folks- I've written a tutorial on how to access the serial port on the Iphone. I am not sure if this also works for the Ipod touch but would assume it does. Let me know your experiences.

For a little while some people have been trying to do this, but sending data to the Iphone over serial caused the Iphone to freeze. I have found a solution for this and have written a first draft tutorial. Let me know your comments, suggestions and experiences! Have fun!

http://devdot.wikispaces.com/Iphone+...+Port+Tutorial

EDIT: PLEASE NOTE: It was recently brought to my attention by Morten that this trick is not necessary for Iphones with 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 firmwares.

Awesome..this one reminds of sniffing the port

anyway ill try to check and follow this tutorial.

Tia,

__________________
http://idecode.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/d3code
http://www.appleph.com

Wow,
thank you, it seems soooo close to connect a serial GPS and display curent position on Google Maps :-)

Great achievement, i need to get that toolchain up and running, grrrr...

Ender

P.S. anyone knows where to get the mentioned parts (ipod connector , TTL converter) in Germany ? Reichelt ?

P.P.S. to connect a GPS or Gamepad the A232C Adapter seems to be perfect, right ?

I can think of a lot of applications for this. GPS is one, but controller for NES.app is another big one.

Yeah, I think the way the serial port works lends itself more to custom devices made with Microcontrollers, etc instead of existing serial devices like GPS. But things like GPS can be connected up and the Serial GND toggled with a button to gain access, or maybe some other trick involving 555 timer or something.

I updated the Tutorial this morning with some more details to make it more clear. Will update it over time and expect to see some projects using it from me too

enderfx: yah A232C-3 will work fine if the Gamepad is RS232. You can find some GPS that are already at the proper levels, but some are 12V too. This one is already at TTL levels http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pro...roducts_id=575

Sad but this makes one think of hooking an external bluetooth to the phone. Such as the following of something similar,

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pro...roducts_id=582

You would still have to port a BT stack to the iphone... and if you did that, you could access the onboard BT quite easily...

I'll try to mod a USB keyboard (one of those flexible ones) to work with the iPhone... A bit clumsy, but hey, you can't get a portable computer much smaller than this

Right now what's stopping us from porting a BT stack to the iPhone is that we don't have the ability to activate our own kexts in the kernel. Since there is an existing, working kext for talking to the serial port, porting a BT stack to work with *that* would actually be somewhat fruitful.

Ok, thank you very much, TheRain

I will try and tell you if it works.

I am also working on GPS for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) :
- the first step is to put a micro-controler between the iPod and the GPS module in order to select/filter the datas
- then, develop a GPS navigation app.

Maybe should we combine our forces and developp it on a common project.
My goal is to develop a cheap GPS for my car.


You can get an ipod connector here : http://home.swipnet.se/ridax/connector.htm