Hackit: What To Do With A 1st Gen IPhone?

June 9, 2008 by 34 Comments


There’s a new iPhone 3G coming out in July. If that statement shocks you, you might want to check your connection. We love new shiny hardware, but what we’re really interested in is the number of “old” iPhones that are going to be hitting the market. Many people will be ditching their 1st generation iPhones just to get GPS and 3G. This abundance plus the new $200 price tag is bound to depress the price for used phones.

A used 1st generation iPhone is actually a pretty attractive device. It’s already been laid wide open by hackers so you can run pretty much anything you want on it instead of waiting for the App Store to tell you what you can and can’t do. You could use it as a WiFi Voip phone, a simple web pad, run an NES emulator, use it as a musical instrument, or build an army of robots.

What will you do when the price of used iPhones bottoms out?

Hydrophone

June 4, 2008 by 14 Comments


Chances are you’ve never wondered what your goldfish is trying to say, but if you have (or if you just want a project), check out this DIY hydrophone.

You will need a computer microphone, vegetable oil, plastic wrap, scissors, solder, and a small unused plastic bottle. Solder the mic capsule to an appropriate length of cable and test. The entire assembly can then be submerged in vegetable oil inside a plastic bottle. Yes, vegetable oil. Seal the bottle and you’re done.

IControlpad, IPhone Gamepad

May 24, 2008 by 7 Comments

[CraigX] has been dabbling in iPhone accessories lately by adding a gamepad. Called the iControlpad it surrounds the iPhone making it look very PSP like. As anyone who has jailbroken and installed emulators probably knows, without feedback the touch screen based buttons are less than great.

The unit is currently a prototype however there are plans to produce and sell the units. They have received support from Zodttd, an organization that has created iPhone apps like snes4iphone and genesis4iphone. The developers also state they’ll provide source and SDK support. The sparse development blog announces their success using a hacked up SNES controller over the docks serial connector, but they provide absolutely no details.

[via Engadget]

Erase An IPhone Properly

May 20, 2008 by 14 Comments


A fundamental problem with flash memory has just gone mainstream. A detective successfully recovered data from a refurbished iPhone purchased from Apple. Flash memory controllers write to blocks randomly so using standard secure erase techniques are no guarantee that all of the storage space will be written.

[Rich Mogull] has posted a method that should wipe out almost all remnants of your personal data. You start by restoring the iPhone in iTunes and turning off all the syncing options. Next you create 3 playlists large enough to consume all of the phone’s storage space. Sync each playlist in turn and your residual personal data should be obliterated. All that’s left to do is sit back and wonder when the first article about the MacBook Air SSD being impossible to securely erase will be published…

M3 Headphone Amp

March 14, 2008 by 11 Comments


If you’re serious about your headphone amps, you probably already know about the M3 headphone amplifier. Instead of going for the extra tiny, they’re going the ‘screw the size, it’s all about the sound’ route. Thsi thing needs a 24v .5amp power supply. Boards are available, and the discussion has gotten so long on headwize that they exceeded the maximum thread length.

I got busy with the laser last night and came up with something new: a custom etched track pad. It still works, with a bit of added texture where I introduced it to the warm glow of the laser. Hit the link for pics and a walk through.

IPhone GPS Module

December 14, 2007 by 22 Comments


The boys over at engadget put this up while I was working it over, but I’m still gonna hit it. [Curt] sent in the iPhone GPS he put together. He’s using a micro-controller to send the ground toggle handshake we mentioned in the iPhone serial tutorial, along with a small NMEA serial GPS module. After the handshake is completed, the controller hands over the serial port to the GPS output. (Since the handshake only needs the ground toggle, I’d guess that the module is connected to the TX/RX lines all the time.) By the way, the GPS looks like this SiRF II board sold by spark fun electronics.