Re:Headphone Jacks Are the New Floppy Drives
by mikeash on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @04:45PM
(#11956856)
Drifting off topic a bit, but Electric Imp has an interesting approach to the configuration problem. Their devices have a light sensor, and the phone app sends the SSID/password by flashing the screen. You hold the phone to the sensor for a few seconds and then it's all programmed.
Re:Headphone Jacks Are the New Floppy Drives
by kamkha on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @04:51PM
(#11956918)
> What if a 3.5mm cable was a way for your phone to connect to various IoT devices to pass the basic setup data like your wifi SSID and password instead of this goofy process of broadcasting it's own wifi network that you have to connect to.
For what it's worth, the latest Canary (https://canary.is/) is configured via a 3.5mm cable connected to your phone, and the configuration process is relatively smooth compared to the goofy ad-hoc WiFi network approach.
So for the analogy to make sense, 3.5mm plugs would have to be dying, actively and ubiquitously being replaced by ... whatever. Lightning? USB-C? But they're not. The 3.5mm jack and headphones in particular are probably more common now than ever before.
I personally would love to see the headphone jack become more useful in lots of different ways. Square managed to make a CC reader that plugged into the 3.5mm jack. Impressive, using it as a data port for simple data. Can we do more of that? What if a 3.5mm cable was a way for your phone to connect to various IoT devices to pass the basic setup data like your wifi SSID and password instead of this goofy process of broadcasting it's own wifi network that you have to connect to. Any app can push signals out the headphone port, and it works the same across iOS and Android. Maybe I'm an idiot and that'd never work but the point is: 3.5mm isn't dead. It's very much alive and kicking.