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The iPhone Serial Port Hack
An anonymous reader writes "The iPhone's little known secret, a hidden serial port, is revealed. 'The real benefit in all of this is that there are so many console packages for iPhone in Cydia now that you can have a fully functional computer, as useful as a Linux box, but without carrying around a laptop.'"
Get a Nokia N900 or Android.
Just get a Nokia N900. Nothing hidden there.
"Don't jailbreak your iPhone, that's stupid. You shouldn't have to do anything to run the software you want. Instead, get an Android phone. Yeah you have to root it to run the software you want, but that's totally different".
And yet, you are posting on Slashdot.
Yeah you have to root it to run the software you want, but that's totally different
You're right, it is. Unless you Jailbreak your iPhone, you're stuck with the App store. I can install programs from wherever I want to on an Android phone by selecting an option built into the OS.
Living With a Nerd
Or, I dunno, a small netbook and a USB-to-serial cable. They're hardly massive.
It's not like you don't know in advance when you're going to need a terminal. If you can remember to bring that massive dongle thing along you can remember a netbook.
No sig today...
Please don't use the hardware you purchased and is now yours for non-Apple authorized activities.
How soon until you're just licensing that iPhone?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
<sobbing level="softly">I don't want to go back to carrying gender changes, null modems, 9/15 pin changers as well as worrrying about DCE/DTE and handshaking ..... </sobbing>
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Never. There's no need. You can own the hardware. You just can't use any of the software included until you agree to the license, and thereby agree to Apple's restrictions on how you use the hardware.
That's the cleverness, really. They don't control your ownership of the hardware. So to a naive observer, you're completely in charge. But the moment you actually try to use any functionality embodied in the included software (i.e., anything capability beside "crappy doorstop" and "blender fodder"), Apple owns you. As long as your path coincides with Apple's decisions, you're golden. But try to do anything they don't want you to do... "You get nothing! you lose! Good day, Sir!"
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
But you need a 3G data card in the netbook if you want to just leave it in situ and ssh in to it; the iphone and this box can juat be plugged in and left there -- (for as long as the battery lasts) -- you can be wherever you like.
So your saying you can leave it somewhere running on it's battery for about an hour?
Be seeing you...
How last century! What are we going to see next -- how to interface your iPhone to a paper tape reader/punch? Instead of this -- cut the cable, and get an RS-232 - to Bluetooth adapter, similar to this. They are cheaper than the parts for this hack. The iPhone is a wireless device.
Computers obey me.
Because hardware "is hard". The bulk of the arduino crowd doesn't really want to play with hardware, they want to buy kits and write some glue code for premade libraries and pretend like they know microcontrollers.
Means to an end, and all that. They're more concerned with what they can do with it than how they accomplish it.
So a jailbroken A is more open than a B in its original, closed state? Fascinating.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Alas, this hack won't do it:
In other words, this design is powered with a power source that isn't even available until the iPhone/iPod is booted up.
I guess you could fix that with an appropriate external power supply; a little wall-wart and some appropriate voltage regulation.
A USB-serial adapter like the CA-42 (powered from the PC on the other end) would be perfect for that purpose. Check out all the OpenWRT or similar "serial console" articles.
I really, really hate these Zen/internet/GNU Koans from the hackers dictionary.. They all sound like they were written by Renaissance Faire types and don't really impart anything to me except the mindset of people who thought Unix workstations were AWESOME and then proceeded to infight with 114 mutually different flavors of unix.
Fantastic. So to get a usable device, I have to install a different operating system.
It is cool, nice to be able to do, etc, but not quite the same thing.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.