As Joel Evans from the Mobile Gadgeteer explains, “when it comes to Apple and its proprietary dock connector, many developers have been left out in the cold when it comes to wanting to create the perfect add-on for the iPhone or iPod touch.” But of course, no enterprising inventor is going to let a proprietary dock get in their way when there is another perfectly good non-proprietary dock available on every Apple iPod, touch, iPhone and iPad. Hello RedEye Mini … the headphone jack!
Ahhhhhh!
So what’s a RedEye Mini? Simply put, “it’s a dongle that plugs into your iDevice’s headphone jack, which when paired with the RedEye application, turns your iDevice into the ultimate universal remote control.”
Pretty cool, right?
As for how the hardware actually turns your iDevice into a remote control, according to the folks at ThinkFlood, the device itself houses a microprocessor, some large capacitors, and more, and then turns the headphone jack into a small modem. In their words:
“We can send signals up to the mini’s processor through the left and right channels, and the processor can respond over the microphone line. Thankfully iOS gives us fine grained control over audio playback and recording so we didn’t have to worry about keeping up on that side.”
They also use a technique called power harvesting to give the RedEye mini an extra boost when transmitting an infrared signal.
If your interest is piqued, then you’ll want to take a look at Joel’s RedEye Mini review.
Happy clicking. 🙂