A while ago I found both the pinout and the protocol for communicating with an ipod. I wanted to put together a program that would allow me to control my ipod from my computer using the dock cable. But I couldn’t figure out how to get a dock connector to serial adapter. Nobody makes one that I could find. I thought about buying a cheap power charger and cutting it up, but I didn’t want to drop $15 just to find out that they didn’t fully populate the connector (since they only need about 4 pins, it would make sense…).

All this changed this week when I found a page where you can buy blank ipod dock connectors. It is a guy in Australia, and he is going to ship me 6 of them. Total cost: $16 (And change). All I need to do is solder on some wires and hook it up to a serial port plug (can get at radio shack) and I have my cable.

The next step is to just write the code to communicate with the ipod. The protocol looks to be a simple serial protocol. I’m thinking of doing it in Java using the javax.comm packages to do the serial port communications. I would build it as two projects, a communications library and then the actual application. I’ll keep you guys informed on my progress….

Tags: hack, ipod, java // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)