GPIB?!?! AHHHHHHHH!!!!
GPIB? KILL IT WITH FIRE!
Seriously: Nuke the entire site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!
Let the 1980's have their technology, for the sake of all sanity! If you must do this, use LXI.
Mac applications developer Panic has found something interesting inside an Apple video adapter: a computer. While trying to figure out why video output from some iDevices was so poor, the company cracked open a Lightning AV Adapter, a $US49 accessory that is sold as allowing Apple devices to send video to HDMI devices in …
It's still in quite widespread use if you look in the right places. While mass-produced stuff has generally abandoned it even in its traditional test equipment heartland it retains the advantage of being very easy to implement - it's the only bus that can transmit at those kinds of speeds while being built on a generic stripboard for example. If the device in question is a unique one-off that's a very strong attraction, since the costs of PCB design and fabrication can't be amortised over a large number of units. The relatively simple protocol (especially by multidrop standards) at both ends of the connection helps massively with those short-run costs too.
I work in just that kind of short-run embedded engineering shop. Several times I have sat down at 9am with a list of requirements and gone home at 5pm having designed a circuit, written the firmware and host software, built the thing and tested it. That's doable with GPIB. The next preferred option would be 10base-T, but that means careful impedance matching, PCB layout, a TCP/IP stack on the device, more sophisticated host software, etc etc. The unit costs will end up lower but you have to offset those against the design costs: that's generally at least a day's work and if the production run is three or four easier is almost always cheaper.
Careful, it sounds suspiciously like you know what your talking about..... I used to nurse an old 486dx 33MHz with ISA GPIB card along until about 2004, when it finally gave up the ghost. Only thing that would talk to a spectrum analyser for testing EMC emissions. Looked for a USB to GPIB interface widget back after P.C failed, but don't remember finding one.
Happy daze......
In a previous job in the late '90s, whilst 'decommisioning' an old Mainframe I came across several boxes of GPIB leads, (yes, the Mainframe had a GPIB interface card) was told to bin them with the rest of the garbage, but passed them on to a research group who I knew had a fair amount of test gear with GPIB ports. I was later told by one of the guys there that a rough estimate on the cost of purchasing the leads I'd given them was in the order of £4,500.
My next job I had the delights of administering a Linux box connected to a £750,000 'device' via our old friend GPIB, and, AFAIK, that beastie is still in use.
@OP - the point is that there is a single port on the iDevice, which is used for multiple functions, not just video out. one port, multiple adapters. not multiple ports, each with a separate adapter each.
you're obviously content to have a device with multiple ports, which you may or may not need. iDevices have a single port, which you at least need for charging and possibly for syncing. if you want to do anything else with it, then you buy an adapter, but not everyone needs video out. not everyone needs a GPIB interface. So the few that want a video out via cable have to pay a bit extra. the rest of us stream to our AppleTVs to get video on the telly, without having to pay even the $5 for the hdmi adapter you mention.
I've got iNews for you jai, Androids have one port that they use for multiple functions as well. Charging, USB connection and HDMI output... all on the same connector without needing an expensive cable that has a computer inside it. Now what was the benefit of all that extra iMoney you spent?
Having created a smaller port, they find they can't send 1080p video over it. So:
a) outputting from an iPad to a TV means horrible video quality
b) You can't use an old dock-to-hdmi and a new lightning-to-old dock adapter together, even though some Apple stores have claimed you can.
c) expensive adapters
I actually like Lightning on my iPad 4, and this isn't relevant to me since I don't connect it to a TV, but I bet this means Lightning has a very short lifespan-there's no way it'll be able to do 4K when that arrives.
Yeah, but it quite clearly isn't 10gbps if it can't even stream 1080p HDMI, which is under 5gbps.
Indeed it looks like it can't even stream 1080p H.264 (although this might be an issue with the iDevice's video encoder rather than Lightning itself).
Clearly Apple's use case is iDevice -> TV via an AppleTV over AirPlay. How dare you deviate from that.
".. which is why you'd simply push it wireless to an Apple TV. Works. Using AirParrot we do the same with Windows laptops.."
Hold on, so instead of carrying around my Galaxy note and HDMI adaptor (£5 on Amazon), I have to carry around an Apple TV as well as an ipad?
Hold on, so instead of carrying around my Galaxy note and HDMI adaptor (£5 on Amazon), I have to carry around an Apple TV as well as an ipad?
:)
No, you're correct in that that would be useless for portable applications (my oversight, I tend to use a "normal" laptop for that which has a boring VGA adaptor). It's more for the reverse - we have a fairly large screen in our office which has become the major means of presentation since we stuck an old v2 Apple TV on it that someone had lying around gathering dust. Might as well give it something useful to do..
I can explain the theory. By reducing what the connector does to 'a serial bidirectional stream of data' you turn all possible external connectors into mere software extensions. Whatever you want to output must already be data within the device, so you export that data over the connector and let the cable worry about reformatting it.
In this case that appears likely to have put some sort of video codec into the loop between device and cable and leaves the cable having to decompress video and run a framebuffer.
So what Apple has done, in contrast to the single-port Android phones, is made no concessions whatsoever to the two or three cables it's pretty obvious most people are going to use in real life right now. I guess the calculation was that the chips that have to go into the cables are going to be very cheap very soon and they need a connector that they can stick with for ten or more years in order to ensure accessory lock-in. There's probably also an argument that they've overreacted to the old connector having long disused pins for Firewire, still having what will very soon be obsolete pins for analogue video, etc, etc.
"Contrary to the opinions presented in this thread, we didn’t do this to screw the customer. "
No, probably not with the adapter. You screwed the consumer when you made the lightning connector (or whatever hipster name you came up for it). It's a crappy connector (to hard to remove because it's way too tight and the part you hold is too small). It's not compatible with accessories (I know, there's an adapter for that, too, but how do all these adapters jive with the magical design philosophy?).
But the real screwing is that there's a perfectly awesome, widely used connector out there: the micro usb. I have dozens of those cables and chargers around, because all my devices use it. Some firm who never innovates, just copies (sam sung what?), even shoots HDMI over it.
Paris, because she loves what you did to her.
lightning is WAY better than micro-USB. A good connector OUGHT to be tight. And because of the nature of the uses put to it, often is the main thing holding devices into their cradles. And it works both orientations. Micro USB is extremely fiddly, hard to slot in, and has no holding power. As for speed, lightning is basically USB, so no pros or cons as far as that. Probably lightning will become USB3 at some point.
Yeah, micro-USB is a standard, it has that advantage. But even ignoring Apple's desire to keep it proprietary, its a way better connector for the situation.
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More likely the other way round - the text is clearly written in response to something else, and it fits quite well as a follow up to the Panic post. It is posted in isolation on Slashdot without any context making the whole message seem a little out of left field. It would also be far from the first time someone has bulk copy and pasted something to Slashdot with nothing in the way of attribution.
I've no idea as to the respective time zones for those timestamps but is seems clear which was first in reality.
Wrong. The firmware is held on the iPhone or iPad, when plugging in the adaptor the iDevice uploads the firmware into the adaptors RAM and it starts working.
It's actually a very neat solution to a problem, but one that probably shouldn't have existed but I guess some people are still stuck in the cable era.
There are many other devices that used to do this, USB ADSL adaptors for instance.