I'm trying to create an app which powers an external accessory but I am not sure how to do it. Any hints or ideas?
All i plan on doing right now is have a UIView app that sends power to an external accessory.
Is this something that you would even code?
I would have thought that you just have a small amount of power to the device, regardless of the software running on the iphone/ipad/itouch.
That's going to be tricky and probably not in the scope of coding. First, you'd probably need to be a member of the Apple Made For iPhone (MFi) program and have to build your device to work in those specs.
Then you'd need to have the iOS device become the master USB device and your device become a slave (if I remember my USB controller configurations correctly - it's been 6 years).
But your first step is to get into the MFi program.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/
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I'm working on a project to track delivery trucks leaving and returning to the office.
While I know RFID would work, we're also looking at BlueTooth with mobile apps. Ideally, once a driver installs the app, we register a unique ID for the device, and a BT reader identifies when phones/deliveries leave and enter range without any user interaction.
From the Android 6.0 release notes, it looks like the MAC address is hidden from apps and BT broadcasting. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/marshmallow/android-6.0-changes#behavior-hardware-id
User management of app installs and enabling BT aside, is this feasible?
Can someone point me in the right direction to confirm what identifiers are available?
When I understand you correctly you actually do not want to track where a phone is but want to know if a person/truck/phone passes a kind of checkpoint or gate?
For newer smart phones you cannot rely on the visible MAC. Bluetooth classic is usually not visible and the BLE MAC is randomized as long as the device is not paired and bonded.
Indeed as PaulW11 stated, the simple way would be to implement an app which does BLE advertising with short advertising interval. Inside this advertisment you can put some custom data. This will be visible to everyone. This ID can be some random number, a number assigned by you or whatever.
At the gate you would implement a BLE scanner grabbing all advertisments near to it.
This should be easy to implement.
I would also like to mention the drawbacks here: If someone passes the gate you may miss him. BLE with Android is always tricky and you might have the situation that the bluetooth subsystem on a phone may have stopped working or so.
One the other hand if someone comes accidently near to your gate, you will think he left or returned. Near can be something around 50 m or so with good conditions or only 10 in other cases.
And even worse: If someone stays 'nearly' in the range of the gate you will see im sporadically. This may confuse your come and go logic if he is visible every 3 minutes or so...
I'm working on a little Arduino project to create a bluetooth N64 joystick for my Ubuntu box.
I managed to find a sketch to output the controllers state via serial and it works great. Also sending the TX and RX to the little CSR bluetooth module I have works fine.
When I pair with the device I have to use "rfcomm bind" to see the device in my dev directory and 'cat'ing the output shows all the data is coming through as well.
My question is this, what are my next steps for getting Linux to recognize this device as a joystick - i.e. /dev/js0. If I know what I need to do to achieve this I can read up on the necessary steps but at the moment I have absolutely no clue where to start - having not done anything like this in the past. Should I be looking into creating a Kernel Module?
Any information or pokes in the right direction at all would be greatly appreciated - even if it's just an observation.
Writing custom kernel code is definitely not the way to go here.
To make your project appear as a joystick device in Linux you'll want to present it using the Bluetooth HID profile. With that in place everything should "just work" on the client side and you'll see an entry in /dev. The HID profile is pretty comprehensive and is used by most Bluetooth interface devices - keyboards, mice, game controllers etc. the Bluetooth part of this is actually mostly just a thin wrapper around the USB HID protocol.
From the sounds of things your device is currently not advertising itself using that profile.
I am trying to find a clever way to keep a BLE app active in the background on iOS 6, without breaking any of Apple's rules. I plan to use the phone as a peripheral device and another BLE circuit as the central. My app will automatically be opened when a user arrives to a building using geofencing. After that the iPhone will connect to the first BLE central device it sees (the device will be in its white list). The user will then be able to move throughout the building switching to different BLE "nodes".
My question is: What do I need to do in the background when a user is stationary at their desk so that the app does not get suspended due to memory resources?
My idea is based on this solution for a separate problem: There could potentially (not regularly) be 10-50 users in an area with only a few BLE "nodes" and I read at bluetooth.org that I could setup a dynamic connection system, basically rotating connections through all the users.
My idea is to setup a similar dynamic system where the central device (not the iPhone) disconnects the device on regular intervals (30-40 minutes) and then the iPhone will reconnect.
Is this something that some feasible? Is this against the iOS development guidelines? I was unable to find anything explicit about this. I have also asked on the iOS developer forum, but unfortunately it is not as popular as this site.
Thanks in advance!
Xcode -> Project target -> Capabilities -> Enable background mode
Check Uses Bluetooth LE Accessories
Capabilities
Also enable the following key in .plist file
Required background modes
App communicates using CoreBluetooth
Plist
I asked this same question a few months ago, but I've run into another roadblock and I'm hoping someone will have a flash of insight. The is the previous thread: Detecting if the monitor is powered off
I'm trying to figure out the power status of a monitor, in particular a TV that is plugged in via HDMI. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 with nVidia ION video cards. These PCs will be running some digital signage and I need to make sure the power is on to the TV during business hours. I have a working Python script controlling an IR transmitter to turn the TV off and on. The last piece of the puzzle is to know the current state of the TV.
In my previous thread, I found I could use ddccontrol to get information from the monitor. That worked great for a traditional Asus monitor plugged in via HDMI. However, the Vizio TV says it doesn't support DDC.
I've also tried using get-edid to get live resolution and color information, but that fails to return any information from the TV.
I've tried udevadm monitor but an event only fires on the initial monitor plugin.
I have a feeling that the nVidia drivers are blocking these calls to the monitor, but I can't confirm that.
Ultimately, all I'm looking for is a single byte of information that changes when the monitor turns off.
EDIT: So, I'm coming to the conclusion that this may not be possible. At least not consistently possible across various combinations of video cards and monitors/TVs. The next idea I have is to monitor power usage on an outlet. I first looked at Kill A Watts, but they are completely stand alone. After several hours of searching, I came across Digi and their XBee radios. I ordered one of XBee's Smart Plugs from Digi and a XBee radio and USB adapter from Spark Fun. My current plan is to use a Python script that polls the Smart Plug for power usage.
The plug and radio were kind of expensive. Does anybody know of a power meter that plugs in? Everything I found was wireless. I'd like to be able to connect to it via USB, ethernet, or serial.
EDIT 2:
I could never get the XBee plug to work. It's incredibly difficult to configure the plug unless you buy one of Digi's gateways.
I ended up building my own current sensor. It's Arduino based and cost about $60 in parts. I wrote about it here: http://trafficlightads.net/2011/09/06/an-arduino-current-sensor/
I have a couple of Watts up? .Net models that have USB and Ethernet for monitoring devices and controlling devices. The .Net model adds Ethernet and an internal relay to turn the attached device on and off. This could be used to eliminate the possibility of IR being blocked and not being able to transition the state of the TV.
Watts up? .Net Product Link
They aren't cheap, but they are well-built. I recommend getting the international model if you want the most flexibility in outlet type. This allows you to use your own in and out cords. In the USA model the input cord is hard-wired/integrated.
Good luck.
I am writing a windows application (written entirely in C++) which reads files from a storage card on a mobile phone running Windows Mobile. The tough part is, I don't know how to make my application detect the event that a user has connected the mobile phone to the USB of laptop. I did some reading on MSDN and have written a small code using RegisterDeviceNotification, which detects whenever a USB disk is attached/removed from the laptop. However, I am unable to tweak this to make it work for phone type devices. Please help me out through any links/tutroials which explains this(preferrably C++, as I don't know .NET or C#).
Thanks
Alok
According to this article you can use RegisterDeviceNotification to get notifications when activesync detects a device has been plugged/unplugged. (See option 3 at the end of the article)
It may just be a matter of setting up the correct notification filter.
Windows Mobile devices use RNDIS, a network interface protocol behind the scenes. Hence, the RegisterDeviceNotification method still works, but you're looking for a DEV_BROADCAST_DEVICEINTERFACE, not DEV_BROADCAST_VOLUME. (i.e. dbch_devicetype==DBT_DEVTYP_DEVICEINTERFACE)
You can use RAPI or RAPI2 to detect when a Windows Mobile device connects to a PC via Active Sync or Windows Mobile Device Center. RAPI can also be used to read the files on the storage card and much more.
RAPI is simpler to program because it is a C based API. RAPI2 has more functionality than RAPI, but is an object oriented COM API. If your needs are simple and you only care about one device/connection at a time then RAPI is good enough. There are two RAPI functions used to detect connections: CeRapiInit (blocking), and CeRapiInitEx (signals an event upon connection).