I have an external device (some kind of sensor) that can do a measurement. This sensor can be connected to a PC via Bluetooth or USB cable, and it also comes with it's own software.
I want to develop an App for iPhone that will analyze the data that this sensor is measuring (for example creating a graph, calculating some equations etc.).
How can I make my iPhone to "recognize" this sensor, so the app will get the data that has been measured from the sensor?
Is there any manual which explains how to code this? Our preferred way of transferring the data is via Bluetooth, so there will be no need of using cables.
Thanks a lot!
You can't use Bluetooth to transfer data unless the device is custom designed in compliance with Apple's MFi program. Only those specially manufactured devices can be recognized by an iOS app.
You can use wifi for high bandwidth data, and perhaps audio for encoding low bandwidth data.
Not sure what kind of sensor you have but PASCO scientific has a Made For iPhone Bluetooth device called AirLink2 that works with their sensors. I don't think that could easily co-opt the device for your purposes ... but it might be possible. I mention this because there's an off chance that this would useful information. I am not trying to peddle hardware here ;-)
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Is it feasibly (by feasible, I mean would apple allow) To create a piece of hardware that would allow the USB cable to act as a video input. I have not been able to find anything like this on the market. I know that it's possible to stream video through WIFI locally, but from what I have read it's quite laggy. I also know that in order to create hardware you need a MFi membership, but I'm note even sure if apple would allow this sort of functionality.
Technically, yes it is possible, but in this case for Apple iPhone and iPad is not. USB protocol has a master/slave architecture, for example a Windows PC is the host, while the USB device is the slave. When the USB device is plugged in, the host is informed about the capabilities of the device through the USB descriptor, later the host will request/send abstract USB packets that may be audio, video, files, whatever.
In your case, for iPhone and iPad the host feature is disabled, they may be only clients for other hosts - a PC for instance. It's a marketing decision, because people would be able to buy cheap external storage, instead of more expensive devices or cloud storage. As a consequence your video streaming device which would be a client will not work.
There are two workarounds: one would be to crack Apple iPhone, iPad software, so you cannot build a business on top of it. The second one, would be that your USB video cable to be smart enough (through an embedded controller) to act as a host with the iPhone, iPad, and would a second software on the Apple device to talk with your hardware. It's not so easy, but maybe it worth the effort, who knows...
I know it is the old thread but my answer can be usefull for someone to make further investigation...eventually to provide some schematic, etc. Definitely IT IS POSSIBLE and I have already tried it. The DJI Lightbridge device used mainly for the UAV cameras and video transmission has an USB port and their own aplication for Android/iOS (iPhone) that can transmit the video and to view/record pictures from camera on tablets or phones. The phone acts as FPV monitor in that case. I have used it with the Android tablet and also with the iPhone 5s and it works great!
I read a lot about Bluetooth LE in the past hours, but I do not really understand how profiles work. I want to pair an iPhone with a self-made device over BTLE.
The device should send measured temperature values, humidity or other values over Bluetooth and the iPhone should read that data.
I read about different profiles in the BTLE specs (even about heart measurement), but how does one proceed, when reading CO-emission for example?
Thanks a lot!
Regards, mary
There are two sides to this: the profile you'll define on your device and the code you'll write to communicate with this profile in your iOS application.
On the device, you'll define a profile with specific services for the measurements you want to gather. There are several standard Bluetooth LE profiles which you can find in a list on the main Bluetooth developer site. These include profiles for temperature, heart rate, and walking cadence, among others, so if you are providing measurements in one of these categories you can make your device provide one of those services and it will be usable with any iOS application that reads from that service.
For values that aren't covered by one of the existing services, such as the humidity readings you mention, you'll need to create your own custom service. You'll just have to define the service characteristics (what type of data you'll provide and how you'll provide it) and give this service a unique identifier, because it's one you're creating and not part of the standard ones laid out by the Bluetooth organization.
How you define these services and characteristics will depend on the specific Bluetooth LE hardware you use for your device. I've done most of my work recently on Bluegiga's BLE112 chip, which combines a low-power microcontroller with a Bluetooth LE transmitter. They have very good tools for defining device profiles and creating matching firmware, and it's reasonably straightforward to set this up on their chips. I can't speak for other manufacturers, but they most likely have something similar.
Once you have a profile defined on your hardware, you'll need to look for devices advertising it and be able to connect to them within your iOS application. You'll use Core Bluetooth for this, and I highly recommend starting with one of Apple's sample applications, such as their Temperature Sensor example. That example uses the standard health thermometer profile, but you can tweak it to find your proprietary services in addition to the temperature readings. You can see how they read and process the binary data returned from the LE device in that example.
I highly recommend watching Apple's two WWDC 2012 session videos on the topic, Session 703 - Core Bluetooth 101 and Session 705 - Advanced Core Bluetooth, because they provide a lot of background on the topic and show practical examples of this in use.
I have an external device that we manufacture that basically monitors 4 voltages, converts them to a 16 bit digital number then streams this info back to a PC every 100mS or so, using a serial over USB style chip. Basically a data logging system.
We would now like to collect this information on an iPhone and I am wondering what is the best way to get the data into the iPhone?
I am assuming there is no way we can physically connect directly to the iPhone dock connector as the protocol to do this is not available to iOS developers?
Obviously we could do it over a WiFi network but there will not always be one and we want to keep the external hardware fairly simple, i.e. no need for a computer or Wireless router etc.
If we add Bluetooth connectivity to our hardware would this work? I read that only 'Made for iPod' type Bluetooth devices will connect, in which case how can we achieve 'made for iPod' status? It would be relatively easy to add the necessary Bluetooth chips to get the system up and running.
In an ideal world we would like to do this without having to use a 3rd party interface.
I have been thinking about trying to digitise data as an audio signal – like a modem, and send it into the line input jack, but I don’t think it will be fast enough – this would be new territory for me.
Anyway all suggestions gratefully received!
Thanks!
I know some basic about iOS programming, now i want to connect my app to another non iphone device e.g. connecting to a bluetooth device that can control a light bulb on and off, or control any furnitures.
My question is, besides iOS xcode, what kind of program i need to learn in order to achieve my goal?
Is there any sources that i can learn from it?
For Bluetooth Low Energy devices, you can use the CoreBluetooth framework to access them.
For Classic Bluetooth devices or accessories that make use of the Dock connector, the protocols are not open, and joining the Made for iPhone (MFi) program is required. I do not suggest this for beginning.
My suggestion is to buy for example a Polar Heart Rate Belt that supports Bluetooth Low Energy. These use standard protocols. Sample code is available from Apple that shows how to read out the heart rate from such a device.
As soon as you have mastered the heart rate monitor example, a next step would be to acquire a programmable Bluetooth Low Energy chip (however, often, the development tools for those are rather expensive!). Those chips can be programmed with custom profiles to listen for Bluetooth Low Energy connections and then performing defined operations (lighting a LED) when writes to characteristics occur. So, you are not limited to heart rate monitors and similar devices.
Keywords that you can search for: GATT protocol, Bluetooth Low Energy, CoreBluetooth.
I know that it's a steep learning curve for beginners, but the area is pretty new. However, I can assure you that it's a fun area.
I also think that you should look in to embedded C programming for the slave device (Heart Rate Monitor)
You could get a tod Smart Beacon Development kit for ~$150 and then use BGScript to code the firmware to control the BLE device from your phone or pc. todhq.com for more info.
Does anyone know what kind of range can you get from the iPhone
bluetooth? Also, would the connection be strictly one to one? I know you
can choose from a number of peers to connect to but once the connection
is established, it seems you can only transfer data between one peer? So
basically, is it possible to create some kind of "multiplayer" experience?
Just answering the range part of your question...
The 10 meter figure for class 2 devices (of which the iPhone is an example) is very much a guideline.
The range of a Bluetooth device is limited by many real world factors. The 2.4 GHz radio frequency used by Bluetooth is strongly absorbed by water. For example, consider an iPhone connected to a Bluetooth mono headset. If the headset is in one ear and the iPhone is in your trouser pocket on the opposite side of your body, then there's a lot of water between the two devices. This will often cause a significant amount of packet loss in practice (you can hear this in the audio being carried). So, in this case, the range is about one meter.
At the opposite extreme, two class 2 devices separated by nothing more than clear air can get ranges of hundreds of meters.
Other factors that influence things are:
Interference - Lots of things use 2.4 GHz. WiFi, for example can cause problems.
Antenna design - Space and cost constraints often mean that the antenna design is sub-optimal. I don't know how good the iPhone is in this respect.
Walls - Generally walls attenuate Bluetooth signals. However, sometimes they are useful reflectors.
Quality of hardware - Some chips work better than others. Even different firmware revisions of the same chip may perform differently. Different versions of the iPhone probably have (or will have) different chips in them.
Protocol - It is possible to work around poor signal quality with error correction and retransmission. Even if the iPhone SDK forces you to use a particular protocol, careful design of your application can make a difference.
So, in summary, you should probably do some real world tests.
The connection is one-to-one, but you can create an adhoc network with one of the phones acting as the master/coordinator. The other phones would route all their communication through the master/coordinator.
One device can theoretically connect to 7 devices. according to the master-slave role, the device can multiplex between each of them giving the user an impression that you are connected to all of them simultaneously. Bluetooth specification does not stop you from doing that.This is theory.
Now for the iphone, whether it can connect to to more than one device can only be answered by apple or someone who knows the iphone bluetooth API. But I am pretty sure the bluetooth chip inside iphone should be able to connect to more than one device.
Range is essentially going to be good enough for a normal sized room to be covered. It can be longer or shorter depending on environmental circumstances, but remember that bluetooth was created to implement short range connections.
A bluetooth device can be part of a piconet of eight devices, one master and up to seven slaves. The slaves cannot communicate with each other, they must talk through the master, think of a star topology with the master in the center. The iPhone SDK has a GameKit framework that can be used to create the network for multiplayer games. Go to developer.apple.com at look at the GKTank and GKRocket sample code to see how it's used. These games only support two players, but the GameKit framework supports more. Look at the app store and you will see games that have four or more players.
Hope this helps to get started.
Apple iPhone 3G has a Class 2 bluetooth module. Class 2 Bluetooth devices have a communication range of 10 meters.
At a given instance a device can connect to just one device because it follows a master/slave communication model. But still we can perform a multiplexing. So we can virtually connect to more than 1 device and by rapidly changing the connected device.
I found a good article here. It explains bluetooth very well.
According to the my knowledge, multicasting is not impossible with bluetooth. So gaining a multiplayer experience is NOT impossible.
The bluetooth in the iPhone is Class-2, with a 10-meter range, approximately.
Unfortunately I can't answer the other parts of your question.
One device can be connected up to 8 others. It all depends on the iPhone bluetooth API (which I don't know anything about), but with Bluetooth itself you could then send data to multiple devices.
I tether my iPhone to my laptop over bluetooth every day, and I seem to remember having done that at the same time as using a bluetooth headset. YMMV.
It’s the latest incarnation of Bluetooth, the wireless device-to-device technology that allows your phone to talk to headsets, car stereos, keyboards and other devices directly, without the need for a router or shared wireless network.