[Benjamin] submitted this slick project. It’s a gesture based control unit for the ipod and iphone. It plugs into the dock port and allows you to control the track and volume with simple gestures. While accellerometer equipped units can already “shake to shuffle”, they lack the ability to simply skip tracks forward or backward. He notes that with an accellerometer, simple gestures can be harder to decipher than with a gyro. The gyro gives the ability to tell which direction you are twisting it, so it’s easier to utilize. [Benjamin] was previously covered when he released the iPodGPS.
[googfan], probably our youngest contributor, has submitted another hack. This one is not that complicated, but fairly practical. He has an iPod shuffle, wants to play music through his stereo with it, but found there were no docks available. With iPod accessories being as prevelant as they are, we’re surprised to hear that. He took matters into his hown hands and built an iPod shuffle dock. You can see it in action in the video above. While there isn’t a writeup, you can see some of his other projects on his homepage.
The new Palm Pre cellphone has a “media sync” feature which lets the device sync with iTunes in a fashion identical to an iPod. Last week [Jon Lech Johansen] speculated that this was not done in cooperation with Apple and that Palm was spoofing the iPod’s USB controller. This was confirmed today when a tipster sent him a screenshot of what the device reports in both standard and media sync modes. The Palm Pre reports its Product ID as iPod and Vendor ID as Apple with a few other changes. [Jon] notes that it doesn’t change the root USB node, so Apple should be able to block this behavior with an iTunes update. With Palm already pulling tricks like this presumably through software we wonder if this will become a full-on arms race.
[Nate] hates keys. He’s gone through a lot of effort to remove them wherever possible. He has a keypad at home and a keypad at work, but he still has to carry car keys. His solution is to build a device he can carry in his pocket that will unlock the car via RF. To do this, he’s utilizing the guts of a Nike iPod puck along with an Arduino and an iPod serial board. He has managed to get this all working, but still has to carry his key to actually start the car. We know what his next project will be.
Here’s a quick demo that FAT’s [Theo Watson] put together. It uses the iPod’s accelerometer to measure how fast it’s spinning and plays the sound file accordingly. This only works on the iPod touch 2nd gen because of its curved case. He says scratching is coming next, but currently the app doesn’t know which direction it’s spinning since it’s measuring outward force. This project was done in response to [vanderlin]’s AR scratching that used fiducials on records.
[Benjamin] was working for a GPS company called Nemerix about two years ago and decided to hack together this iPod accessory GPS unit. He is using an Atmel ATmega324 and a Nemerix GPS unit, though he says the GPS unit shouldn’t matter. He is taking advantage of the AiR mode on the iPod which allows a 4 color image to be sent to the screen. There was little information on how to utilize this, but BMW and Alpine had made some car audio that featured this. [Benjamin] picked up an Alpine with this function and sniffed the data stream to get what he needed. He says there is good documentation out there now though.
He says that the source code is available if you ask.
This looks like someone watched the Obsolete Technology Band, and had to have one of their own. It appears to be a dock, driving several different sizes of old hard drives. While the concept isn’t new, we thought they did a decent job of putting the whole display together. It could be fun to have that mounted on our wall, waiting for geek friends to impress.
You should all know the drill by now. New electronics hit the market and someone has to post pictures of it spread open bit by bit. The new shuffle is no different as iFixit shows us. There are some very nice pictures of the entire process. As you can see, most of the space is taken up by the battery. The thing that is probably most striking here is the main problem that many people have with it; there aren’t any buttons.
With the recent announcement that the only controls for the Ipod shuffle will be on the headphones, many were let down. [James] has come to the rescue, showing that you can just solder new ear buds on the end of the wires. Though this may not be the perfect solution, especially if your cable gets damaged, at least you can get a little better sound. This is a great example of something to show kids. It’s not too difficult and teaches them that if we’re not happy with something, we can hack it.
The iPod Touch 2G jailbreak was first shown in January. It had to be applied every time the iPod was booted. The iphone-dev team just released the 24kpwn LLB patch to allow for a persistent jailbreak. The team had been hanging on to this patch because there was the possibility the exploit could be used on future iPhone versions. Unfortunately, a group started selling the code, so the team was forced to release it for free. iPod owners are certainly happy though. There is a tutorial available for updating a factory reset iPod (backup link). The team will include the patch in future official tools.
Many G1/ADP1 owners have been using the app Tetherbot to get internet access on their laptop via USB to the phone’s data connection. The app relied on the Android Debug Bridge to forward ports. It worked, but people wanted a solution better than a SOCKS proxy. The community figured out a way to create a properly NAT’d connection using iptables and then [moussam] rolled them up into easy to use applications. There’s one for setting up a PAN device on Bluetooth and another for adhoc WiFi networking. It requires you to have root on your phone, but hopefully you’ve achieved that and are already running the latest community firmware.
Now that the iphone-dev team has unlocked the iPhone 3G they’re moving onto jailbreaking the iPod Touch 2G. While they have a fully working jailbreak, it’s not yet in a user friendly format. [MuscleNerd] did a live video demo this afternoon to show what progress they had made. It starts with him showing the iPod on but not booting. He’s already patched the kernel, but it’s failing the signature check in iboot. He then uses the team’s recoverytool to exploit a hole in iboot and patch out the signature check. The ipod then boots normally and he shows non-App Store software like Mobile Terminal, Cydia, and an NES Emulator (which makes use of the iPod’s internal speaker).
The redsn0w jailbreak works, but it has to be applied via tether every time the iPod boots. The team won’t release anything until they’ve found a way around this problem. For more insight into the boot process, check out our coverage of their Hacking the iPhone talk at 25C3.
Embedded above is a demo video of an iPhone running a Linux 2.6 kernel. The iphone-dev team has created a new bootloader called OpeniBoot. The bootloader lets you boot into a Linux console, which you can talk to over a USB serial device. They’ve got busybox working, but there is no touchscreen support yet. The instructions are not that difficult and include how to back up your settings. It works on first and second gen iPhones and first gen iPod Touch. This is a very early port, but the future is wide open… Android iPhone?
The Griffin AirCurve Dock is a nifty gadget that uses a coiled horn to increase the volume of your iPhone’s speaker. Griffin’s marketing claims that their passive device delivers “amazing amplification” and “you’ll swear there are full-sized speakers in there.” Meh. It does look like an interesting project for someone with a 3D printer. You could experiment with different passage and dock shapes. At least it gives us an excuse to post two massive DIY horns.
