I'm developing a custom electronic device - think of it as a special kind of data logger, and I need to connect a computer to it to configure it and to extract the data.
I know I can do this without too much trouble on a PC, but I'd like to use an iOS device to do this.
Two questions:
Can I do this with a regular dock connector / USB cable? Will the EA framework let me do all the communicating?
Once I have extracted the data, what's the best way to get that out of the iPad? Make an email with it, save to a dropbox or something?
Thanks!
Afaik, you need to join the MFi program to make USB accessories for iPad/iPhone. That will give you all the technical resources needed.
As for data transfer there are only "opinions", I say the more options of sending, the better. Just don't force the user to choose more than once, then make it changeable in settings.
If you're doing very light communication, you might be able to get away with using the headphone jack.
Apps communicate to the headphone port through the various audio frameworks on iOS. AVFoundation is a high-level abstract framework to do various audio operations, but for fine-tuning the communication to a device over this interface, you will likely be using the C-language callback-based Audio Queue Services framework to do audio I/O.
This is nice because your device can be cross-platform (iOS, Android, Mac/PC) as long as you write the corresponding software, and because you don't need to go through Apple's MFi approval program. Think like the Square credit card scanner.
You will have to write the communication stack between the device and your iOS device but yes, you can.
there's very few docs about using the EA.framework. All the juicy parts are in the Mfi program but Apple is very strict about giving access to it.
So if you succeed, sharing a tuto will make you a EA hero ;)
About sharing your data, imho, email + CSV is a winning combo.
If you want to plug something into the dock connector, you want to have a look at https://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/
Related
I have a device that can be communicated with over LTE with the same functionality as you normally get through BLE.
However, I'm having a hard time understanding how you communicate with, and get callbacks from an LTE device in the same way you do with BLE.
It doesn't seem that there is a library like CoreLTE but is there a standard way to use LTE like we use BLE (CoreBLE)?
In other words, how does one do essentially something line:
func lteCentralManager(lteCentral:LTECentralManager, didDiscoverPeripheral ltePeripheral:LTEPeripheral,
...
lteManager.connectPeripheral(ltePeripheral, options:nil)
...
NOTE: I realize that the technologies are different. The above is only meant to make the point of what I'm trying to do - not imply that the calls would be the same.
If there is no standard way to do this, does anyone know a good place to start figuring it out with iOS? I've read the standards. I'm just looking for how to use it now in iOS.
Thanks for the help.
iOS does not offer APIs to interact with the LTE modem directly, so this is impossible - not to mention, even if the hardware and software was capable of it, why would the scammercarrier allow you to talk to nearby devices directly instead of going through their network where they would charge you for that bandwidth?
If you need short-range communication between iOS and Mac devices you might want to take a look at Multipeer Connectivity. Firechat uses it successfully to enable off-network chat between nearby devices.
I want to create a project which will interact with the iPhone/iPad via the 3.5mm jack. There are a bunch of these accessories on kickstarter.com. Although, I could't find any SDK that will provide me the possibility to get data from jack input.
I have seen that some people at progical.com have a sort of SDK that can manage this kind of connection but they haven't answered me yet (I applied for their SDK few months ago). Is there any alternative for that? I want to make this project in order to get my degree so the Apple MFI won't apply.
The project will consist in a bunch of sensors that will send data to my app using 3.5 audio jack. Using my app, I will process the received data.
The 3.5" Jack connector is originally supposed to send and receive audio data. It means that if a connection is plugged in, the OS will automatically redirect all audio signals to it (with a few exceptions). Thus, you can access the data using the built-in audio processing APIs of iOS, for example CoreAudio and audio queues.
As an example, you can generate and receive signals of different frequencies, which can be used to control and get information from external devices (you'll need some kind of electrical engineering for this to work, though - filtering, separating control frequencies, etc.).
I'm working in app where I need to implement a simple voice functionality between two iOS devices in same network.
My doubt is about how to get audio units from master device and send over wifi or bluetooth network directly to slave device in realtime.
Some things about network communication I have done, I can transfer any NSData between devices using TCP.
Is very important to not use GK framework, because I need to connect two clients without any notification. For example, when I use GK to connect two devices, the iOS display a alert with a connection request, I need to avoid this connection request.
Currently I can do this with video, is more simple than audio.
Any ideias about the implementation of this are welcome.
Thanks.
First of all, you need learn how to capture the audio using Audio Queue Services.
Then transmit the audio data it over wifi and bluetooth and play it at the other side.
The most obvious choice for you is to use bonjour.
GameKit framework is built on top of this. You dont have to build too much on top of this for your application though. Yours is a straightforward application of bonjour.
Please refer the code for chatty if needed. Incase you need some background theory, please refer to http://mobileorchard.com/tutorial-networking-and-bonjour-on-iphone/.
I have used Audio Queue Services for the same sort of project.
For Networking I am using Bonjour and it has really solved the problem of transmitting text and video.
Did a lot of workarounds to make a voice chat in wifi using Audio Queue Services but have not succeeded. I will update once I find the solution other than this.
I would like to develop an (personal) iphone app to use the iPhone as a controller for a small device such as a fan or for example a light bulb. Does anyone know if there is some kind of controllable iphone-dock to use for something like this. And are there some kind of methods to use with such a dock? For example the fan just needs a variable voltage for different rpm.
Thanks in advance,
EAAccessory requires that you become a Apple hardware partner, which is very expensive and not easy (this is why you only see large companies releasing hardware accessories for iOS devices).
There's a few ways around this. The easiest way is to have your app send OSC signals over WIFI to an OSC server. I've set this up before using TouchOSC on the iPhone and an Arduino connected to my desktop via USB. It's not hard at all, but it requires that you have an Arduino connected to a computer; it's not ideal.
Alternatively you can use audio output to send commands over the line output in the iPhone's dock connector, effectively turning the iPhone into a software modem.
Good luck and if you get this figured out, post the code on github. :-D
EAAccessory framework might not be what you want because of the requirement for you to have the license and hardware. You could better implement some sort of small webserver that runs an arduino or something similar. check this out for an example of that. on the arduino, you could just have a 5v relay to control the switch of whatever device and have the other pins of the relay connected to a hot (or cold depending on the relay state) standard 120v plug so you can plug anything into it. here is a good project for arduino controlled relay
for direct serial control, you could do something like this but it would require being jailbroken. i think for a personal app, doing it via wifi would be the best way unless you jailbreak and install the full bluetooth stack where you do not need EAAccessory stuff
Check out EAAccessory Framework. Used to handle external devices.
You could try using an ultrasound detector attached to your device, and playing an audio file at the appropriate frequency etc. on the iPhone.
I've just started working at a biomedical company and we need to communicate data from a device we are making to an iPhone. Obviously using the made for iPhone program would suffice, but for prototyping and for a simpler solution I was wondering if we could use an existing bluetooth audio transmitter, such as (http://www.buy.com/prod/bluetooth-a2dp-audio-hifi-dongle-adapter-transmitter-for-iphone-3g-ipod/q/loc/111/211900047.html?adid=17662) but instead of streaming audio, program it to stream data. I'm not so good with the hardware side, and wouldn't be designing the hardware on our end, only the software, so just wondering if with the current SDK, we can send data through an audio streaming device?
Any help is greatly appreciated :)
I've been looking into it, and found FSK a suitable solution.
I have a few links you could check out (most involve the Arduino, but you can ignore that).
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1274970878 (blog post on arduino forums that is helpful)
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjp.blog.reinforce-lab.com%2F (japanese description of FSK from iPhone to Arduino)
http://code.google.com/p/arms22/downloads/list (software libraries)
http://sree.cc/electronics/arduino-as-an-fsk-modem
http://www.perceptdev.com/labs/iphonehacks (old iphone hack that creates a FSK modem with the iPhone)
http://www.progical.com/ (company that sells such dongles, but wouldn't reply to me)
http://eecs.umich.edu/%7Eprabal/projects/hijack/ (awesome project)
If you really want a realiable solution, look into serial data (jailbreaking might be required, but awesome for prototyping):
http://www.ohscope.com/2009/02/24/serial-port-on-iphone-with-minicom/
http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/iphone-serial-communication/
UPDATE:
Thinking outside of the box, if you want a really reliable solution; I bought this recently.
http://redpark.com/c2db9.html