We manufacture a new accessory for iPad/iPhone which should transfer commands to the iPad. We like to use UART (through a certain Apple-protocol called Lingo). My research shows that I can only use USB (30PIN Connector) and custom protocols.
Question:
Is there any way to use UART to connect to the iPad accessory from APP side?
If the protocol is implemented in UART, we should be able to move it to USB, if it's not available to my App via USB.
My main guess is that the UART commands & access are protocols reserved to the iPhone OS and not available to Apps. Certain UART commands also include settings for volumes and Audio re-routing etc, so I guess that's secured.
Without jailbreak, you will not be able to access UART on iPad/iPod/iPhone as a normal developer. If you need access to the serial port or USB, you need to join Apple's MFi ("Made for iPhone") program and you will get full access to all relevant information. Unfortunately, you'll have to convince Apple that you're doing serious business and have a high volume manufacturing facility at hand (see also this thread).
Related
I am looking for a way to load data from an embedded device via a serial port (RS232) to an iPhone. The app needs to be on the AppStore and our company is not part of the MFI program.
Before you say, it can't be done, we are looking into Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 as a possible solution. We can create a device that can turn ConnectBlue's OBS421 module into a serial port adapter (with the speed bursts limitation). To that effect, connectBlue provides their own protocol called Serial Port Service, but it is documented only on a very high level.
Does anyone have any experience in using this protocol? If so, can you provide an example(objective C) code that establishes communication in this way?
Has anyone submitted an app to Apple that does this without getting rejected for infringing MFI rules?
One more question.. The device I am trying to connect only supports serial commands in the EZII Escape Computer Command Set standard (PROG ID of "EZ2 2.0" and higher). They look different than the common ATT-Commands. Example: <ESC>Gc100<EOT>.
Any idea if I can send such commands via ConnectBlue's LE-SPS?
Your help is much appreciated.
Thank you!
I haven't used this protocol but from the documentation it seems quite straight-forward. You should be able to take any of the core-bluetooth examples and adapt it fairly quickly.
You need to look for a peripheral that is offering service 0x2456e1b926e28f83e744f34f01e9d701
This service exposes two characteristics -
0x2456e1b926e28f83e744f34f01e9d703 to read & write to the serial port
0x2456e1b926e28f83e744f34f01e9d704 for "credits" if you need flow control. Essentially it seems that this value indicates the number of bytes you can send to the device and you can write a value to indicate the number of bytes you are prepared to receive from the device
The device should support a full 8-bit data path, so I don't see why you would have a problem sending the serial commands.
Bluetooth Low Energy is specifically excluded from the MFI program, so you won't get rejected on that basis -
I want to develop an accessory that communicates with an Apple device
using only Bluetooth Low Energy. Do I need to join the MFi Program?
No. Accessories which connect to an Apple device using only Bluetooth
Low Energy/BTLE/Bluetooth 4.0 or standard Bluetooth profiles supported
by iOS are not part of the MFi Program.
Bluetooth Low Energy does not have a SPP defined as a standard protocol.
You have to program it yourself using the GATT service/characteristics, you just need to generate your own 128bit UUID (google it, there are plenty of UUID generators and even on Mac or Linux it's easy to generate from command prompt)
GATT sends smaller chunks of data which you would have to concatenate yourself in the other end.
Be aware that the throughput of BLE is quite low compared to Bluetooth Classic SPP. Maybe around 3kbytes/sec.
I want to make an app that interfaces with a sony radio that has an app to control the unit. It uses external accessory framework from iPhone so how can i get all the protocols from the radio or is there anyway to read the protocols coming from the sony app that would communicate with the radio. In short can i get the protocols from the sony radio using external accessory framework?
How does the device connect to the radio? 30 pin/lightning? Bluetooth? or WiFi?
Only the manufacturer who has entered into the MFI license agreement with Apple will have the details on how to interface with their device via cable or Bluetooth, so it is unlikely that you will be able to discover the protocols without some fairly low-level electronic monitoring of the signals.
If it is a WiFi connection then you may be able decode the protocol using Wireshark or similar.
You can use this app to get the supported protocols: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/EADemo/Introduction/Intro.html
But you won't be able to do much without reverse engineering the protocol.
I would like to build an application on my iPhone that connects to my raspberry Pi. Because these are going to be in close proximity (next to each other), I'd like to use the wired connection (lightning port to USB) to communicate. Is this possible or must I use wireless technologies? My assumption is that wired would be better as it ensures a connection and would be faster, however, I am open to be corrected.
This is related to a hobbyist project where I want to access a raspberry pi sensor on my iphone. The sensor (and Pi) will be next to the iphone. I'm building a custom weird case to combine them.
Any thoughts much appreciated.
Thanks
Iain
For communication with peripheral devices (Raspberry Pi for example) you have several alternatives.
UART via 30-pin or lightning connector (MFi needed)
USB via 30-pin or lightning connector (MFi needed)
Quick start: Microchip's development kits. This module can prolong communication to RPi or you can try to implement the Accessory stack (and communication with authentification chip) to RPi itself.
FSK or similar modulated-audio communication via audio-jack (no MFi needed)
You would have to implement hardware FSK modem on the RPi side and a software one on the iOS side. It is a bit tricky but by no means impossible.
Of course you could implement software modem on the RPi side, too. But since RPi doesn't have audio input you would have to use an USB audio card or something. Or complicate your life trying to sample an analog pin fast enough.
User not really Jake made a quite impressive list of links on this topic here on SO.
Bluetooth as an External Accessory (MFi needed)
Quick start: RN-41/42-APL
Easy to use Bluetooth stack. Communication with authentification chip is handled by the BT module. Note that when communicating with iOS devices data troughput is not much better than when using BLE modules.
Bluetooth as a BLE module (no MFi needed)
Data troughput not much worse then the old BT. Implementing the communication might be a bit more tricky code-wise. This module seems interesting.
WiFi communication (no MFi needed)
WiFi might be a good choice. But for your device and iOS device to be able to find eachother you will need either static IP (for the server device) or minimal Zeroconf (Bonjour) implementation.
When using WiFi you can go either with infrastructure network (using external Access Point) or you could go with AdHoc (created by your device). Later seems promising but be careful - iOS7 & AdHoc network don't seem to work well together yet.
With WiFi you have many modules to choose from. A simpler to use would be a module like RN-XV WiFly Module. TCP stack is already implemented in the module - you can use simple UART communication. I'm not sure how to implement Zeroconf on this one.
Or there are raw WiFi modules like MRF24WG0MA/MB. They are stable and reliable and they can be used on home-etched PCB. Downside for RPi user would be that you would almost certainly need an PIC24 or something between the RPi and MRF24W. Microchip provides free TCP/IP stack for their microcontrollers and this stack includes Zeroconf.
And the easiest way: you could simply use a WiFi dongle (with RPi) for communication. Zeroconf should be easy enough to implement on the RPi - and it's not even needed at the begining if you are ok with assigning static IP to the RPi (if it acts as a server).
This is not possible without signing up for apples MFI program. You have to pay and sign a bunch of NDA's.
https://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/
You can use other methods, like bluetooth and connection over the audio port.
While #RokJarc's answer is pretty complete, I've also had success with both wired (lightning to usb) and wireless connections using iOS's personal hotspot. Here are the steps:
For wired, on the Pi, install ipheth-utils:
sudo apt-get install ipheth-utils
And add an eth1 network interface by editing /etc/network/interfaces to include:
allow-hotplug eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
For wireless, make sure /etc/network/interfaces has a wireless network entry such as:
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
If you are using wpa_supplicant and add a network entry for the iPhone's hotspot in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:
network={
ssid="Banana Phone"
psk="ring ring ring"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
id_str="banana"
priority=3
}
The ssid should be the name of the phone from Settings -> General -> About -> Name and the password should come from the personal hotspot screen.
Now start the personal hotspot on your phone. The pi should automatically connect when connected by a usb to lighting cable or using wifi. After connecting, the pi should be assigned an ip somewhere in 172.20.10.x. You can run ifconfig on the pi to figure out which one. (I believe that you should be able to define a static ip here but haven't messed around with that yet)
From there, you can connect another computer to the hotspot and ssh into the pi using the 172.20.10.x ip or even ssh directly from the phone.
In my personal testing, latency over lightning is consistently low and I've used this on both a Raspberry Pi Two and Raspberry Pi Zero for streaming realtime mjpeg video from two cameras to a VR headset. In this scheme, the network is a fairly small source of the 100ms or so latency. The experience is not Vive quality of course, but it is still usable and the iPhone + Pi combo provides lots of fun hacking opportunities
It's possible to do this with Mfi.You can run usbmuxd service on your Raspberry Pi. The usbmuxd will transfer the USB data into socket packets. Your iOS App also need to implement the same protocol to rx/tx the data from/to your Raspberry Pi.
David House has already made this work. https://github.com/davidahouse/PiTalk
I'm trying to find out what AWDL is. On iOS, if you use Apple's peer-to-peer networking over BlueTooth, it seems Apple creates a new Network Interface "awdl0" to implement (I guess) IP-over-BT.
But I can't find any docs on this tech, or this interface, how it behaves, things we must / must not do with it, etc. Google comes up blank :(.
In particular, I believe it means "established a BT connection, and I'm running an IP bridge over the top, and you can use this to communicate peer-to-peer". Apple's own system libraries have bugs where this bridge isn't setup quickly enough, and if you send data too soon, it appears to get dropped by the OS. So ... if I can query this awdl0, I hope to check "are you ready yet?" and delay P2P messages until the OS is happy.
UPDATE
More info: I can get pairs of iOS devices to create awdl0 connections to each other - but they never get created to OS X machines, whether BT and Bonjour are on or not, whether the devices are paired or not.
Some background:
In iOS5, Apple permanently disabled the Bluetooth parts of Bonjour/Peer-to-peer networking, and published a technote instructing everyone to use DNS-SD if they wanted to keep using Bluetooth as a transport between iOS devices. This is fine, but it means you must use DNS-SD if you want high-performance BT, and you want it reliable.
(GameKit sometimes works fine, but we often see terrible performance in real-world scenarios, e.g. crowded public places - which goes away if you use DNS-SD)
DNS-SD protocol doesn't include info to tell you what the hardware is using. But it does tell you the Network Interfaces (which is how I know we're running on awdl0)
DNS-SD is awesome, and we have high-speed, low latency connections peer-to-peer between iOS devices - all the stuff that GameKit promises but often fails to deliver whenever there's more than a few wifi/BT devices in range.
AWDL recently caught a lot of attention when it caused Wi-Fi issues in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite devices.
What is AWDL?
AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link) is a low latency/high speed WiFi peer-to peer-connection Apple uses for everywhere you’d expect: AirDrop, GameKit (which also uses Bluetooth), AirPlay, and perhaps elsewhere. It works using its own dedicated network interface, typically “awdl0".
While some services, like Instant HotSpot, Bluetooth Tethering (of course), and GameKit advertise their services over Bluetooth SDP, Apple decided to advertise AirDrop over WiFi and inadvertently destroyed WiFi performance for millions of Yosemite and iOS 8 users.
How does AWDL work?
Since the iPhone 4, the iOS kernels have had multiple WiFi interfaces to 1 WiFi Broadcom hardware chip.
en0 — primary WiFi interface
ap1 — access point interface used for WiFi tethering
awdl0 — Apple Wireless Direct Link interface (since iOS 7?)
By having multiple interfaces, Apple is able to have your standard WiFi connection on en0, while still broadcasting, browsing, and resolving peer to peer connections on awdl0 (just not well).
You can find more info here and here.
I'd like to provide a more precise answer as to how the protocol works internally. I quote part of the abstract of this paper.
In short, each AWDL node announces a sequence of Availability Windows
(AWs) indicating its readiness to communicate with other AWDL nodes.
An elected master node synchronizes these sequences. Outside the AWs,
nodes can tune their Wi-Fi radio to a different channel to communicate
with an access point, or could turn it off to save energy.
From a user perspective, AWDL allows a device remain connected to an infrastructure-based Wi-Fi network and communicate with AWDL peers "at the same time" by quickly hopping between the channels of the two networks (AWDL uses fixed social channels 6, 44, and 149). In contrast to the previous answer, we found that current versions of AWDL work fairly well and channel hopping only induces a small overhead.
Disclaimer: I'm co-author of this paper and we retrieved this information by means of reverse engineering. If you are interested in the details, please read the paper and have a look at the Wireshark dissector (published soon).
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/