bigiain's posterous

So, now I've got a freshly minted Apple iOS developer key (yeah, I just paid $119 to be allowed to run code I write on a device i own... *boggle!*), I'm pondering an idea (since I'm officially an iPhone app developer)...

There's now old 3G iPhones available for a couple of hundred bucks. That gets you a reasonable size touch screen, a gps receiver, and the accelerometers. You also get 3G internet connection.

I'm imagining using the iPhone as a dashboard for a motorcycle - the GPS and accelerometers can measure my speed more accurately than my mechanical speedo, and the GPS would let it be smart enough to know what the speed limit is on the current bit of road, and even know where fixed speed cameras and the RTA's designated "mobile speed camera" zones are as well as other "known" speed enforcement areas or time-over-distance-camera sections of road, and warn me about them. With an internet connection it could also check the RTA traffic twitterfeed and warn me of incidents in my general vicinity, and possibly suck the traffic layer out of googlemaps and warn me of slowdowns ahead... It could connect to http://www.trapster.com/ to warn of user reported speed traps and roadwork. If it's possible to operate the touchscreen in gloves it could allow on-the-fly reporting back to trapster or recording in the local database.

It'd take some thinking/hardware to replace the entire dash, getting a tachometer input into the iPhone, and indicator lights for indicators, ignition, and oil pressure might be tricky (possibly something through the dock connector, or if the whole Apple insistence on complete control of interfacing hardware becomes an issue, perhaps some hardware than encodes those signals into audio and feed it into the microphone input in the headphone socket?) I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy with the oil pressure light being under (possibly buggy) software and (probably jerrybuilt) home made hardware control, but I could leave that alone (with it's almost steampunk level of "wire-pressureswitch-lightbulb" technology) - none of the rest of it is safety-critical...

Things to work out:

• Can I operate the touchscreen in bike gloves (and does that change in the rain?)
• Can I get signals into an iPhone app from the dock connector (without paying an Apple tax)?
• If not, can I cheat and encode data in an audio signal and process the info out? (Shazam does.)
• If I started my DashBoard app, could it run indefinitely, or will I need to be able to reboot and restart the app somehow? (which might be hard if I've made a suitable motorcycle dashboard enclosure for it)
• Can I build a water-tight enough enclosure which still lets me operate the touch screen? (is there ay "magic" about screen protector films?)
• Can I build an enclosure that disguises the iPhone-ness enough and/or secures it well enough that I could leave the bike parked and expect it to still be there when I returned?

I wonder if this would be of any interest at all to anyone else? Its more complicated than "just buy the app on the app store" since there'd need to be at least an enclosure/mount for it that'd require custom building for each person's bike, and extra hardware if you want a tacho or indicator lights to work on the phone screen. Maybe just adhoc distribution of the code would be enough (I think that limits me to about 100 other people), or perhaps go the whole hog and used jailbroken iPhones and ignore any of Apple's attempts to control what I do with hardware i own?

Now I just need to carve out some copious free time to build it...