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.
iphone hacks251 Articles
IPhone Serial Access Tutorial
[TheRain] sent in his tutorial on using the iPhone’s serial port. Apparently there’s a hardware trick required to enable two way communication. Whatever device is attached to the iPhone needs a secret handshake to get things talking both ways. Once the serial ground has been strobed high to low in the proper order, things will work like normal.
ToorCon 9: Real World Fuzzing
We dropped in on [Charlie Miller]’s fuzzing seminar at the end of the day yesterday. Fuzzing become a fairly popular topic in the last year and essentially involves giving a program garbage input, hoping that it will break. If it can’t handle the fake data and fails in a non-graceful fashion, you could have found a potentially exploitable bug. Fuzzing is a fairly simple idea, but as Charlie points out, without some thinking while you’re doing it it’s unlikely to be very productive.
Simple IPhone Headphone Mod
Apparently the iPhone jack isn’t quite standard – it’s a bit recessed to the point that third parties are offering adapters for it. [John] offers this simple method for modding Etymotic’s fine ER6i headphones. (If only I could find mine. I haven’t seen them for 8 months.) I suggest using a utility knife over a pocket knife. It’s simple, easy, and will probably work on most headphones.
Free Your IPhone
I wasn’t going to post this – it’s a freakin phone after all. But I’ve gotten quite a few tips on it, and I’d like them to end. [George] made a concerted effort to hack the iPhone – and it paid off. After his crazy ebay auction that topped out at 99,999,999.99 last time I checked, he ended up trading his first phone for a Nissan 350z and a few more iPhones.
He documented his process, step by step – if you’ve got the skills, you can probably do it yourself. The soldering work is damn fine work – probably the hardest thing there is. The write up is a little hard to follow, so plan on taking some time to comprehend everything. (Blogging software isn’t the best way to organize how-tos, trust me on this.) My hats off to [George], he did some great work. – So, why didn’t I want to post it? All this work yielded one thing: carrier choice for the iPhone.
IPhone Eve’ Extra
The guys at I-hacked put up a how-to on giving your windows mobile phone some iPhone skinned powers, but later in the day they decided to make it login required. Thanks to [Katrina] for the tip. (requiring logins for contributed content just doesn’t sit well with me.)
[chris] sent in his own round up of his personal projects.
[Chris Coleman] let me know about hacktherazr. They’ve got some decent guides on customizing just about everything on the things.
[Ben Heck] got sick of emails, so he’s offering to build one more xbox 360 laptop, if you give him a pile of money.
Staring sunday, I’ll be ripping the hell out of my new house (and re-doing most of the upstairs). Do me a favor and keep the tips line brimming over.
[David] has some interesting ideas involving wireless AP antennas and wireless keyboards. How about a cantenna…
