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I needed a quick way to test signal interactions with a microcontroller and an iPod, so for about $50 and an afternoon of soldering, I threw together an iPod dock/breakout box. Ingredients include a small breadboard, and a $15 cheapie usb charger cable, which when stripped of its plastic housing luckily has all 30 dock connector pins ready to solder. A spare dock adapter holds the iPod after cutting and gluing it into a Radio Shack project enclosure (The Apple dock comes with a variety of adapters, I used the iPod photo version to hold the iPod video, albeit not securely enough to use in a car). I threw in a couple of 1/8" headphone connectors for line in/out as well as an RCA jack for video. A "Podconsle" communicates with the PC for testing, although I could have used a Max3232 chip using serial port instructions found on ipodlinux.org.

The cool thing about this project was that hooking up the 30 wires with shrink tubing was a breeze since a modelmaker friend told me about the $24 heat gun available at Michaels. Using the weekly 50% off coupon that comes in the L.A. Times yields the perfect wiring tool for only $12 bucks!

The next lazy-afternoon addition will be to add a couple of serial connectors so that I can utilize the iTrip and Airclick that Apple rendered unusable with the latest iPods. I see no reason why they both can't be used at the same time. If there is any interest, I'll release the source code for the PC serial testing program, because I couldn't find one on the web. See the main page for contact info.

UPDATE: Some clarification; By hooking up a microcontroller, one can easily read info from the iPod, such as what's playing, what songs are available, etc. ipodlinux.org lists the serial commands needed to do this, they deserve the credit. (Linux on the iPod is not needed to do this though!) The breakout box makes it much easier to hook things up to the pod for testing. Working directly with the 30-pin dock connector is a pain, the breadboard makes plugging things in for evaluation a breeze. As well, one could make their own dock connector that does much more than the available ones, throw in s-video, charging, microphone pre-amp, a photo card reader (using the Apple dongle), IR remote...someone should make a dock that has "the works" and market it.

Possible uses include using the microcontroller as a simple protocol translator so that one could hook up an iPod into a vehicle (or whatever) and use things like steering column radio controls to run the iPod. FYI, it looks like serial communication with the iPod at 9600bps works relaibly, so a fast microcontroller is not mandatory.