![]() ![]() ![]() Square, the company that made it possible for thousands of small businesses to make charges by credit card, is still sending out free magstripe readers to get its customers onboarded onto its service quickly. Hell, it isn’t even just the small companies that have embraced the simplicity of having a single socket available on all smartphones out there. Smaller, independent companies don’t have that luxury. Are you going to apply for an Made For iOS (MFi) license and pay a $4 royalty fee to Apple for every device you sell, and still need to develop a second version of your product for Android users? Or are you going to use the one socket that is available on all devices you are targeting? For large manufacturers creating millions of units of whatever product they are peddling, it doesn’t matter they’re more than happy to design several different versions and they even begrudgingly pay the licensing fee to Apple. Imagine for a fleeting moment that you are a third-party accessory manufacturer. What do you get? A rich ecosystem of fantastic little accessories. Now take a world of hackers, tinkerers and creative technicians and give them a three-channel interface plus low voltage. Not a lot, but the microphone that’s embedded into your innocuous-looking earbuds does need a little bit of power, which can be harvested (pdf) to power, say, a microprocessor in an accessory. What not a lot of people realize is that the headphone socket also supplies a tiny amount of power. It also sports a surprisingly robust three-channel communication interface: One channel in (for the microphone) and two channels out (for the left and right stereo channel). For next to no money, intrepid hackers can buy a development pack to start hacking with the headphone socket. ![]()
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