Now There’s USB-C On The IPhone SE

July 22, 2022 by 36 Comments

As confusing as it can be, USB-C is actually pretty good, and certainly has its fans. [David Buchanan] must be one of them, for he did a great job putting a USB-C port into his iPhone SE.

[David] didn’t want to ruin a pristine example, so set about hacking the cheapest first-gen iPhone SE he could find on eBay. His approach was simple: get a USB-C to Lightning dongle and hack it into the phone’s body.

The first step was to strip the adapter down and melt off the Lightning connector. He then de-soldered the Lightning port from the phone, and found a bunch of test pads on the motherboard corresponding to its pins. Soldering leads from the adapter to the test pads got things up and running, once he properly hooked up a connection-detect pin to ground.

With a bit more trimming, some hot glue and some enameled wire, [David] was able to cram everything inside the iPhone. Paired with a new screen and home button, and he had an iPhone SE with a working USB-C port. It works for both charging and USB data, too.

If you’re rocking an iPhone SE, you might dig this conversion as it gives you access to more chargers out in the wild. Plus, you’ve still got the regular headphone jack. Be sure to check out the iPhone 13 with a USB C port, too. It’s the hottest new hack until the new EU regulations hit Apple in coming years.

Building A Better 3D Scanner With An IPhone, And Making Art

July 14, 2022 by 14 Comments

Apple’s FaceID system uses infrared depth-sensing technology to authenticate people via their faces. It can also be used for simple 3D scanning, and [Scott Yu-Jan] found a better way to do that.

The main problem with using an iPhone as a 3D scanner in this manner is that the sensor is built into the front side of the device. It’s great for scanning your own face, but if you’re trying to scan an object, you can no longer see the iPhone’s screen. [Scott] solved this problem by slapping together a handheld 3D printed device to hold the iPhone along with an external monitor. This allowed Scott to scan while still seeing what was going on.

Having noticed that some of the 3D scanning apps produced strange, glitchy results when scanning faces, [Scott] decided to innovate artistically. He employed [Andrea] to model, took some scans, and Photoshopped the results into some impressive posters.

Overall, [Scott] demonstrates that it’s relatively easy to repurposed the iPhone for improved 3D scanning. With a simple design, he has a handheld scanner that works way better than just the phone on its own. Alternatively, consider getting into photogrammetry instead.

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Adding USB-C To An IPhone 13 Is Delicate Work

June 24, 2022 by 4 Comments

USB-C seeks to rule the roost when it comes to connectors, and even has Big Europe on its side. Apple hasn’t had to abandon Lightning just yet, but [Restore Technique] has put a USB-C port into an iPhone 13 to give us all an idea what it’s going to be like in the brave new future ahead of us.

The idea came about after disassembling the iPhone 13, and the project was locked in after seeing the first iPhone with a USB-C connector sell for $86,001 on eBay. The plan had to support fast charging, cable reversibility, and data transfer, without cutting out any functionality or compromising water resistance.

The concept is simple enough: take the C94 board from a Lightning to USB-C cable, and put it inside the phone along with a USB-C port. Of course, actually achieving that is the real challenge. Techniques from melting apart Lightning connectors to carefully peeling apart 0.5 mm pitch flex cables to fit 0.6 mm pitch pads.

It’s an impressive hack, and explained so well it’s actually tempting to try it at home for the sheer challenge of the thing. If you do pull off a similar hack yourself, drop us a line! Video after the break.

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The Huge Apple Toolkit For Fixing Your IPhone

May 27, 2022 by 71 Comments

It’s been a frequent criticism of Apple, that their products are difficult to repair. They’ve hit back with a self-repair program for iPhones, and should you wish to take advantage of it they will hire you a tool kit. Not the iFixit box you might expect, instead they give you two hefty suitcases that contain 36 Kg of tools and equipment. Yes, you can repair an iPhone, but they ensure that it’s not for the faint-hearted.

In the kit is an impressive array of everything you might need for your iDevice, including the proper heat plate and press for the job. None of that messing about with a hot air gun for your $49 rental cost and $1200 if you don’t return the tools, but it remains an impossibly difficult and expensive process for all but the most dedicated of Apple fanboy technicians.

The sense from the Verge article is that Apple have had their arm twisted to the extent that they must provide a repair option, but they’ve gone to extravagant lengths to make it something nobody in their right mind would pursue. There’s an attraction in the idea of playing with a fully-equipped Apple repair kit for a few days, but maybe it’s not worth the cost.

Even without the Apple toolkit, it’s still possible to upgrade your iPhone.

Thanks [Nikolai Ivanov] for the tip.

This Week In Security: IPhone Unpowered, Python Unsandboxed, And Wizard Spider Unmasked

May 20, 2022 by 14 Comments

As conspiracy theories go, one of the more plausible is that a cell phone could be running malicious firmware on its baseband processor, and be listening and transmitting data even when powered off. Nowadays, this sort of behavior is called a feature, at least if your phone is made by Apple, with their Find My functionality. Even with the phone off, the Bluetooth chip runs happily in a low-power state, making these features work. The problem is that this chip doesn’t do signed firmware. All it takes is root-level access to the phone’s primary OS to load a potentially malicious firmware image to the Bluetooth chip.

Researchers at TU Darmstadt in Germany demonstrated the approach, writing up a great paper on their work (PDF). There are a few really interesting possibilities this research suggests. The simplest is hijacking Apple’s Find My system to track someone with a powered down phone. The greater danger is that this could be used to keep surveillance malware on a device even through power cycles. Devices tend to be secured reasonably well against attacks from the outside network, and hardly at all from attacks originating on the chips themselves. Unfortunately, since unsigned firmware is a hardware limitation, a security update can’t do much to mitigate this, other than the normal efforts to prevent attackers compromising the OS.
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Is The IPhone Camera Too Smart? Or Not Smart Enough?

March 28, 2022 by 61 Comments

What is a photograph? Technically and literally speaking, it’s a drawing (graph) of light (photo). Sentimentally speaking, it’s a moment in time, captured for all eternity, or until the medium itself rots away. Originally, these light-drawings were recorded on film that had to be developed with a chemical process, but are nowadays often captured by a digital image sensor and available for instant admiration. Anyone can take a photograph, but producing a good one requires some skill — knowing how to use the light and the camera in concert to capture an image.

Eye-Dynamic Range

The point of a camera is to preserve what the human eye sees in a single moment in space-time. This is difficult because eyes have what is described as high dynamic range. Our eyes can process many exposure levels in real time, which is why we can look at a bright sky and pick out details in the white fluffy clouds. But a camera lens can only deal with one exposure level at a time.

In the past, photographers would create high dynamic range images by taking multiple exposures of the same scene and stitching them together.Done just right, each element in the image looks as does in your mind’s eye. Done wrong, it robs the image of contrast and you end up with a murky surreal soup.

Image via KubxLab

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Why Wait For Apple? Upgrade Your IPhone With USB-C Today!

October 15, 2021 by 22 Comments

Apple iPhones ship with the company’s Lightning cable, a capable and robust connector, but one that’s not cheap and is only useful for the company’s products. When the competition had only micro-USB it might have made sense, but now that basically all new non-fruity phones ship with USB-C, that’s probably the right way to go.

[Ken Pilonell] has addressed this by modifying his iPhone to sport a USB connector. The blog post and the first video below the break show us the proof of concept, but an update in the works and a teaser video show that he made it.

We’re a bit hazy on the individual iPhone model involves, but the essence of the work involves taking the internals of a Lightning-to-USB-C cable and hooking it up to the phone’s internal Lightning port. The proof-of-concept does it by putting the Apple flexible PCB outside the phone and plugging the cable part in directly, but it seems his final work involves a custom flexible board on which the reverse-engineered USB-C converter parts are mounted along with the USB-C socket itself. We see a glimpse of machining the slot in the phone’s case to USB-C dimensions, and we can’t wait for the full second installment.

It’s purely coincidental, but this comes against a backdrop of the European Union preparing to mandate USB-C on all applicable devices.

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