UPDATE: We sent the circuit board files off to be manufactured today, and we ordered all the parts. We’ll be posting pictures of the board layout and enclosure soon.”
A number of industrious individuals have achieved what to some is the holy grail of iPhone accessories: an iPhone keyboard. But most have done it in a very hard-to-repeat manner, and few have shared the methods they used.
Expanding on their audio port modem , PerceptDev engineers Zack Gainsforth and George Dean developed a hardware and software solution that allows infrared keyboards to be used for typing on the iPhone, using less than $20 of electronics.
Zack used a Cypress PSoC microcontroller to emulate a simple modem, and then expanded it to detect an infrared signal or read from a USB host controller, which converts this signal to FSK for transmission to an iPhone.
We will be releasing schematics and source code with the release of iPhone hacks.
UPDATE: Here’s the latest video. You can see typing speed and our first project-box prototype
And here’s the video that started it all…
George then created an iPhone application to decode the FSK signals to interpret the keyboard data and display the appropriate characters on-screen.
