Hardware Hacking for iOS Programmers Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This post was originally published on Josetteorama.

The arrival of the iPhone changed the whole direction of software development for mobile platforms, and has had a profound impact on the hardware design of the smart phones that have followed it.

Not only do these devices know where they are, they can tell you how they're being held, they are sufficiently powerful to overlay data layers on the camera view, and record and interpret audio data, and they can do all this in real time. These are not just smart phones, these are computers that just happen to be able to make phone calls.

Alasdair Allan demonstrating an Augmented Reality application

The arrival of the External Accessory Framework was seen, initially at least, as having the potential to open the iOS platform up to a host of external accessories and additional sensors. Sadly, little of the innovation people were expecting actually occurred, and while there are finally starting to be some interesting products arriving on the market, for the most part the External Accessory Framework is being used to support a fairly predictable range of audio and video accessories from big-name manufacturers.

The reason for this lack of innovation is usually laid at the feet of Apple's Made for iPod (MFi) licensing program. To develop hardware accessories that connect to the iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you must be an MFi licensee.

Unfortunately, becoming a member of the MFi program is not as simple as signing up as an Apple Developer, and it is a fairly lengthy process. From personal experience I can confirm that the process of becoming an MFi licensee is not for the faint-hearted. And once you’re a member of the program, getting your hardware out of prototype stage and approved by Apple for distribution and sale is not necessarily a simple process.

However all that started to change with the arrival of Redpark's serial cable. As it's MFi approved for the hobbyist market it allows you to connect your iPhone to external hardware very simply, it also allows you to easily prototype new external accessories, bypassing a lot of the hurt you experience trying to do that wholly within the confines of the MFi program.

Another important part of that change was the Arduino. The Arduino, and the open hardware movement that has grown up with it and to a certain extent around it, is enabling a generation of high-tech tinkers to prototype new ideas with fairly minimal hardware knowledge.

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers. While it started off as a project to give artists access to embedded microprocessors for interactive design projects, I think it’s going to end up in a museum as one of the building blocks of the modern world. It allows rapid, cheap prototyping for embedded systems. It turns what used to be fairly tough hardware problems into simpler software problems.

Turning things into software problems makes things more scalable, it drastically reduces development time scales, and up front investment, and as the whole dot com revolution has shown, it leads to innovation. Every interesting hardware prototype to come along seems to boast that it is Arduino-compatible, or just plain built on top of an Arduino.

Controlling an Arduino directly from the iPad

I think the next round of innovation is going to take Silicon Valley, and the rest of us, back to its roots, and that's hardware. If you're a software person the things that are open and the things that are closed are changing. The skills needed to work with the technology are changing as well.

Alasdair demonstrating an Augmented Reality application

At the start of October I'll be running a workshop on iOS Sensors and External Hardware. It's going to be hardware hacking for iOS programmers, and an opportunity for people to get their hands dirty both the internal sensors in the phone, and with external hardware.

The workshop is intended to guide you through the start of that change, and get you hands-on with the hardware in your iPhone you've probably been ignoring until now. How to make use of the on-board sensors and combine them to build sophisticated location aware applications. But also how to extend the reach of these sensors by connecting your iOS device to external hardware.

Blinking the heartbeat LED of a BeagleBone from the iPhone

We'll look at three micro-controller platforms, the Arduino and the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi, and get our hands dirty building simple applications to control the boards and gather measurements from sensors connected to it, directly from the iPhone. The course should give you the background to build your own applications independently, using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platform.

The workshop will be on Monday the 8th of October at the Hoxton Hotel in London at the heart of  Tech City, and right next to Silicon Roundabout. I'm extending a discount to readers; 10% off the ticket price with discount code OREILLY10. That makes the early bird ticket price just £449.10 (was £499), or if you miss the early bird deadline (the 1st of September) a full priced ticket still only £629.10 (£699).

Monday 8th October 2012

Hoxton Hotel, London

Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)

Normal Price: £699

Save 10% with code OREILLY10

Now with added Beagle Bone Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After the last couple of days my workshop in London on the 8th of October, at the Hoxton Hotel, now has added BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi.

Blinking the BeagleBone's heartbeat LED using the iPhone

We're going top go hands on in a small class setting, deep diving into the iOS internal sensors and how to connect your iPhone or iPad to external hardware. Everyone will get their hands dirty, and everyone will come away knowing more about both the iPhone hardware and how to work with external accessories. So come along and get your hands dirty playing with iPhone, Arduino and now the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi and get 10% off the Early Bird ticket price today only with code BEAGLE10.

Monday 8th October 2012
Hoxton Hotel, London
Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)
Normal Price: £699
Save 10% with code BEAGLE10

iOS Sensors and External Hardware Masterclass Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm going to be down in London for O'Reilly's Strata conference in October, key-noting on the Tuesday morning, talking about the hidden data that follows us around and how I've leveraged that for my own advantage. I'll also be talking, along with my colleague Zena Wood from Exeter, about People Watching with Machine Learning and using modern smart phones, like the iPhone, to do interesting sociology. It should be good.

However I'll be kicking around town for most of the following week afterwards, talking to various people. But I had a gap, a big gap, at the beginning of that week. So I've decided to try and interesting experiment...

I've often argued that both the increasingly rich sensor suite and the ability to easily connect today's smart phones to external hardware, and sensors, make them an amazing lever on the world. It's something I've focused on a lot over the last year or so.

A conversation with Dale Dougherty and Alasdair Allan

While I've run a lot of conferences and workshops over the years, it's always been on someone else's dime. Time to put my money where my mouth is, I'm going to run a workshop.

In fact I'm going to run a master-class on iOS Sensors and External Hardware. This is going to be hardware hacking for iOS programmers. It's going to be hands on, bring your Mac, bring your iPhone and make sure you've got Xcode set up so that you can deploy apps onto your device. It'll be a small group, no more than twenty, and I'll be doing a bunch of live coding.

We'll start the day talking about the internal sensors: the accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and how to combine these into sophisticated applications. Here you'll really get the benefit of my physics background, because I can take you under the user friendly skin Apple have put on top of these sensors as part of the iOS SDK and hopefully give you a decent idea of what their limitations are and how they work.

Then we'll move on to talk about how to extend the reach of the on-board sensors by connecting your iPhone to external hardware. We'll look at how to connect the Arduino micro-controller platform to your iOS device, and build simple applications to control the board and gather measurements from sensors connected to it, directly from iOS. This course will give you the background to build your own applications independently, using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platform.

iPad controlling an Arduino board via the Redpark cable

You'll take away with you an Arduino Uno board, a Redpark TTL Serial Cable for iOS, and everything you need to connect your iPhone to your new micro-controller. You'll also receive a copy of my books Basic Sensors in iOS and iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino.

The workshop will be on Monday the 8th of October at the Hoxton Hotel right next to London's Silicon Roundabout. I've opened registration and I'm offering 30% off the ticket price until the 1st of September. Sign up early, and sign up often.

More about exactly what I'm going to be talking about on the workshop's own website. I've done similar things on smaller scales in the past, but this should be a lot of fun. Hope to see at least some of you there...

Monday 8th October 2012
Hoxton Hotel, London
Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)
Normal Price: £699

Play testing the Lords of Midnight for iOS Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

In 1984 a game called Lords of Midnight written by Mike Singleton was released for the ZX Spectrum, conversions to the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC soon followed. It came to dominate my game playing during my mid teens, games came and went, but always I returned to the War of Solstice and the Lords of Midnight.

The Lord of Blood stands in the Keep of Blood looking north towards the invading armies of Doom Guard as they pour through the Gap of Valethor and onto the Plains of Blood. Things are not going well for the Free.

The game had a well written back story, and for the time an amazing amount of depth to the game play. A unique blend of war game, strategy, and landscape that was ground breaking...

The Lands of Midnight

...and thanks to Chris Wild's bout of nostalgia in the early nineties, and his port to MS-DOS, I went on playing the game. There was even a multi-player version of the game, called Midnight/MU built, allowing you to play online through your browser. It seems I wasn't alone in my nostalgia.

But things changed with the arrival of the iPhone, and even more so with the arrival of the iPad. I thought the iPad was the perfect platform to revive the game. While it was epic in nature, the turn-by-turn nature of the game meant that unlike some other strategy games it was well suited for the dip-in and dip-out nature of gaming on the platform. More so, I wanted to play my favourite game on my new hardware. I stopped playing Chris' port and started to think idly about porting his code, or more likely his Midnight Engine to iOS. I poked around in the source code, but eventually decided against it. Instead I waited. Someone else was going to do it, it was just a matter of time.

My patience was seemingly rewarded, there was going to be an iOS port and Chris Wild and Mike Singleton were going to work on it together...

...but time passed, actually quite a lot of time passed, more than a year, and it started to look like vapourware. Until just a couple of months ago Chris posted some video footage of the game to his blog. It existed, if only in the roughest sense, and it was playable.

The pre-alpha demo of Lords of Midnight for iOS

Content to wait at that point, I sat back. Not only was there going to be an iOS version, but because of the way Chris had ported his Midnight Engine, using the cross-platform Marmalade SDK, there was going to be a port to Android, Mac OS X and MS Windows. This wasn't just an simple iOS port, this was a cross-platform remake of the original game. There was even discussion of finally making the almost legendary missing sequel The Eye of the Moon.

I waited, I'd gotten good at it...

The Lords of Midnight for iOS

...and then Chris put out a call for play testers. I didn't spot it, but amazingly my editor at O'Reilly, Brian Jepson, did. I managed to make it into the play test, which is another one I owe Brian.

Play testing the iOS port

The graphics are still the original imagery taken from the eighties, and the interface is still a bit shaky, and there are a few bugs in artificial intelligence, but I'm enjoying having early access to the game. I'm enjoying wallowing in my eighties nostalgia.

But beyond that I think, that with the bugs and interface problems properly addressed, and the graphics updated to something that looks at home in the twenty first century, that this is still and above all a solid game. That in fact this is a game that appears as if it was always intended to be on the iPad, as if it was always meant to run on touch hardware. The new platform suits it, like a new suit of clothes.

This isn't an ageing rock star coming out of retirement for one more nostalgia tour, this is something bigger. Just like it did the first time around, I think the Lords of Midnight for iOS could change how gaming is done on the platform.

Not bad for a game that's now approaching thirty years old?

Connect your iPhone to the real world Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The arrival of Google's Accessory Development Kit (ADK) for Android, which allows you to connect your Android handset to an Arduino-based development board was seen by some as the beginning of the end for Apple's restrictive Made for iPod (MFi) program.

Today we discovered Apple's response to Google's ADK, and while it's still inside a crunchy MFi wrapper, the program is now a bit gooey in the middle, as today saw the release of the Serial Cable for iOS from Redpark.

The cable is a fully MFi approved external accessory that allows home-hobbiests to talk to external hardware, no jailbreak required. On one end of the cable is a dock connector that plugs directly into your iOS device. On the other, is an RS-232 serial port that you can easily connect to anything that speaks a serial protocol.

Suddenly connecting your iPhone to the real world became a lot easier, easier in fact than using Google's ADK.

I've been working with the pre-release version of the cable for a couple of months now and I've put up some sample code to get you started. Including a rather nifty Universal application for the iPhone and iPad which will let you directly control an Arduino board. I've dubbed it the "Paduino."

The "Paduino" application.

• Paduino Xcode Project for iOS (470KB)
• Arduino Sketch for Arduino (1KB)

Because someone had to...?

 A simple "Push the Button" example.

• Xcode Project for iOS (250KB)
• Arduino Sketch for Arduino (1KB)

Also in the works, but not quite ready yet, is a book which will walk you through how to use the cable and how to integrate your iPhone or iPad into the Internet of Things.

Finally if you're at OSCON next week I'll be talking about the cable and how to use it on Thursday. We're hoping to have an early-release copy of the book ready by then.

I can't wait to see what people can do with this...

Location Enabled Sensors for iOS Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Yesterday evening I gave a talk on "Location Enabled Sensors" to the Bristol branch of the BCS, the slides from the talk are embedded below.

An iPhone Book by an Open Hardware Advocate Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I was surprised a few days ago when someone pointed out that as an open hardware advocate it might be viewed as, well, odd for me to write a book on iPhone programming.

	Intrigued by a open hardware advocate that has written an O'Reilly iPhone book: @aallan
	@erikevenson via Tweetie in reply to @aallan

A couple of years ago there was a great hue and cry about the death of the desktop, and the end of the Internet. Mostly brought on by Johnathan Zittrain's book, "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It."

Jonathan argued that today's technological market is dominated by two contrasting business models: the generative and the non-generative. The first model, general purpose computers, allow third parties to build upon and share through them. The second, non-generative model, is more restricted, with appliances that can only be modified by the vendor. He is very much afraid that the second model, where we are locked in by vendors is coming to predominate.

I don't think my opinions on this have changed much in the last two years. The iPhone, and now the iPad, are held up as being evil for being closed platforms. I don't think that's a problem. There is plenty of room for closed platforms.

Cory Doctorow argues that the next generation of kids won't be able to grow up and become programmers. That buying an iPad sends the wrong message to your kid, that the world isn't yours, it's something you have to leave to professionals.

Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals. - Cory Doctorow

I think he's dead wrong. Technology has moved on, and the world is changing. What is changing is that we’re in the transition phase away from one model of computing and towards another. I’d argue that the underlying trend is towards more openness, not less. It's just the things that are open and the things that are closed are changing, and with that the skills you need to work with the technology.

We're moving away from general purpose computers towards more purpose specific devices. Amoung these are the iPhone and the iPad. However the passing of the desktop computer, and the Web, is not the problem people should be worrying about. The important thing for people to hang onto is the infrastructure, the pipes themselves. The Web isn't the Internet, the Internet existed before the Web and it'll be around a long time afterwards. So long as we have the pipes the content flowing across them is really rather irrelevant. I'm far more worried by threats to network neutrality than I am by the death of the general purpose computer.

The only thing that's changing here is that the tools and skills you need to play with the next generation of technology; ubiquitous computing, embedded devices, mobile devices. So you'll need different skills than you might have used to play with the last generation of technology? The fact that you have to go out and learn some electronics to take part in the next big thing isn't such a big deal. You're supposed to like learning new things. Go buy a soldering iron and stop worrying about vendor lock-in so much...

...and even if you don't believe me? Stop worrying, the kids are going to be just fine.