iPad Serial-Port Adapter Previewed 88
swandives writes "Following on from the iPhone serial port hack, Chris Pollock shows how an iPad will look with a serial port adapter for those who need more screen space. The pictures show a basic prototype, but Pollock expects to have a more attractive alternative up and running in the coming months."
Re:A bit bulky eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A bit bulky eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you need to reach into a rack or whatnot then a long cable from your laptop should do the trick. For me the advantage of an iphone adapter is that you can reuse a device you will definitely have on you rather than having to carry the laptop everywhere.
This should work okay on my openmoko. It has a usb host mode and I have a usb-serial cable which I have used with a laptop as a console device.
Re:A bit bulky eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Though since he seems to have posted the pinouts and whatnot I guess someone else could try taking a whack at making it better.
Like a ... wireless BlueTooth to Serial port adapter? [google.com] So all you have, other than iPad, is a little serial port dongle thingy? That'd be my choice: rather than hacking Apple's proprietary data/power connecter (though it had to be done... but now that's out of the way), hack their bluetooth stack [google.com]
I wish... (Score:4, Interesting)
all those "I don't need that, it's useless... I need that instead" commenter would realize that they are not alone in this world and that other people may have different need.
I personally don't need it because, as most tech users, I now only have a few, if any, devices with serial interface... but I can see how something like that may be totally useful.
There are still a lot of people who work with specialized equipment, often having serial port interfaces. Having a serial port interface for iPhone or iPad can become very interesting, as those device can be used very easily while standing hand holding them in the hand. With a laptop other than a tablet PC type laptop, I've always found doing this clumsy.
Re:Boring (Score:3, Interesting)
Its even more boring than that. The jailbreaking developer community has been able to tap into the iPhone's serial port for some time now. I was interfacing with the iPhone over serial in early 2008, before the iPhone SDK was even released, using publicly available information from the jailbreaking community.
The real "news" here is that someone's found a use for this thats caught the attention of the mainstream online technology press.
Re:A bit bulky eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
And those alternatives suck badly.
USB? Guess what, unless it's a bog-standard USB-serial adapter built in (FTDI, Prolific or other common one), you're gonna march into a data center, stick your USB cable in, and get "Insert driver CD" or somesuch nonsense sooner or later. Not to mention the manufacturer has provide Linux/Windows/MacOS X drivers. And those drivers will always be too old, because the equipment will run until it's obsolete, and there won't be drivers for Windows 8, Lion or Linux 2.8.
Ethernet - great, so I need to find out why it dies and have to reconfigure my network stack to the IP or other strange protocol that the device wants.
Serial sticks around because it really just works. At slow enough speeds (9600) USB adapters work fine and your laptop/etc can be pre-loaded with the necessary adapters. Or you just plug it straight in. Sure you need to know the configuration, but any decent admin would've put it on a label. If not, there's only really 4 speeds to test - 9600, 38400, 57600, 115200 that would cover pretty much 99.99% of the devices out there. And modern embedded UARTs are often autobaud.
Plus a serial port is dead-simple to program from the startup assembly code. Initialize the UART (fixed configuration), then just write to the base address to output a character. USB and Ethernet, not so much.