I’ve been thinking for awhile now about using my old iPhones in my IoT projects. They have touch displays, wifi, cameras, audio, accelerometers, and maybe GPS depending on how old they are. Plus they have almost no value once they get a few years old. The only real downside to using them is the fact that they’re a bit hard to program, but hey, that’s what I do for a living.
So this past weekend, I scrummaged through my old Apple parts boxes, and came up with (2) iPhone G, an iPhone GS, iPhone 4s, and iPhone 5.
Doing some research, I decided that the iPhone G is not really worth messing with for a couple reasons:
- The newest iOS support available is SDK4, so writing code to run on it would be difficult, and could not support the advanced features released over the past five years or so.
- The iPhone G does not have a rear facing camera. One of the features I want to eventually support is using the camera for a room monitor. But since the phone will be mounted to a wall, the normal front facing camera will be pointed into the wall.
That said, the support for iPhone 3GS is not bad, but it is limited.
- iOS 6 is supported
- Xcode 7.3.1 is supported, currently the latest Xcode.
- Swift is NOT supported. Swift requires iOS 7.
Using an iPhone 3GS for simple control panel
So just for fun, I created a version of the control panel in Objective-C for iOS 6 to run on the iPhone 3GS. This app simply displays images in a collection view, and calls the Particle.io API when one is pressed. I probably won’t add much more to this app, but instead develop a Swift version for use on the newer phones. I’ll add new features to that version, and leave the Objective-C version for just simple control operations.
Update: I’ve now posted a cleaned-up version of the app code to Github, and and article on Hackster.io.