Monday 30 September 2013

The Plan - Sensor Fusion Hardware

Apple guard their hardware closely, to build accessories for the iPhone you need to join the Made For iPhone (MFI) program. This helps keep the quality up to scratch but is a pain for the hobbyist! Enter the wonderful world of bluetooth low energy (Bluetooth 4.0 LE). The library needed to communicate with Bluetooth LE devices is part of the standard Apple SDK. No need to join the Apple MFI, this is my way in...
So the Plan is to develop a Bluetooth LE device that can plug into the Oculus rift and act as a bridge to send the data to the iPhone. Since the Rift is a HID USB device, I might as well make this bridge generic enough to support controllers as well. This will handle the data connection, the next thing I need is a power source. Lucky the Oculus is a relatively low powered device, this will allow me to use a simple USB battery power extender from ebay. If all goes well I should have a few hours of wireless rifting between charges. Stay tuned for more detail.  
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. Unknown30 October 2013 at 18:22

    Is it possible to use External Accessory Framework without joining the MFI program? See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17923145/is-mfi-required-if-i-am-using-lightning-to-usb-camera-adapter-with-external-us

    In theory, you should be able to connect the rift directly to an iOS device using the usb camera adapter. Then, with the External Accessory Framework you should be able to collect sensor data on iOS.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)