due to the nature of USB peripheral devices like the iPhone require a host (normally a PC). If we went USB the the host would have to be built into the rtek (expensive) and on top of that I don't even know if apple give developers access to the USB port.

 

is a USB host universal though? You can use it across any platform and then port the software to recognize the host? Just out of curiosity how much does a USB host usually cost?

 

Would an Iphone version work on the newest ipod? Because I for one don't want have to get a new phone provider just for my rtek. Frickin apple!!!

 

No, theres a whole layer of drivers that would need to be written and they are very hardware/platform/os specific.

 

What about an rs232 to USB cable if you could make a driver for the iphone if it doesn't already have one.

 

No can do. Ok, where theres money, theres a way. But the iPhone itself would need to support it, the hardware would be expensive. There are "USB on the go" controller chips which, when designed with it in mind, would allow any USB peripheral to be a master or a slave (used typically to connect a camera and a printer to print directly from the camera, even though both would normally connect to a PC)... but again, both sides have to have the hardware and drivers to support it. The iPhone does not support that.

We are currently working on a cross platform design.

 

I'm just trying to make a few hopefully helpful suggestions, probably shouldn't waste my time as it seems you have thought of everything already.

 

but here I go again anyway

http://www.pcables.com/cat7.html

I think I paid $20 or more for the cable I had to get for the palm m130, when I could have saved the cost of buying the palm. I would have much rather purchased this cable for $80 to $100.

 

well I wasn't aware that there was a serial port on the iPhone so thanks for showing me. I'm going to guess you still need a Jailbroken iPhone. But from the poll we ran here showing the most requested platform being a laptop, we will not put time into anything that will lock us into hardware again.

 

Laptop works too!

 

palms fine (cheap and glovebox stowable), but iphone would rock.
+1 for iphone

 

Thats an exciting cable. I don't have a rtek yet but when I plan on making more power it is definitely the route I'm going to go. Iphone controller would definitely rock, but I'm sure I could deal with a palm . Laptop would be pretty cool as well.

 

USB is a complicated mess with several layers of hardware and software abstraction... It makes writing software for something pretty much guaranteed to be platform dependent.

A Java app could do the trick, most PDA's have a JVM (no idea if it supports the serial port or not) as well as just about every computer OS (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) This way also there could be different versions of the screens, one for small devices like Palm or WM or iPhones, and full size ones for PC's.

I've been kind of interested in trying a bluetooth <-> RS232 adapter so i could use my Palm TX's BT instead of relying on a crappy m105 for the car. How hard do you think /that/ one would be to hack into PocketLogger?