Hi there, new to the forum and I'm currently doing a project where I'm dismantling some old iPhones (6 and 6s respectively) and utilising the parts and am wondering if it would be possible to utilise the bluetooth in them with a gyroscope (harvested from said iphones) and teensy arduino to create a dice which could transmit to a computer gathering the data received and transmitting the code to this dice unit. I've looked into utilising the feather bluefruit as well. I also want this to partner with another set up which should hopefully use the touch screen on the iphone as another form of controller feeding back to the computer (if anyone has any tips on connecting that too that would be awesome).
How skilled are you in hardware engineering?
Good enough that I've regularly replaced broken hardware in phones and can take my phones apart without too much trouble but other than that I'd consider myself a beginner especially with arduino. I've used raspberry pis a long time ago and a microbit. I do have a more experienced person to help me but their condition is I gotta tell them what to do, especially as they're not too sure about removing the bluetooth from the phones and whether repurposing them for the dice will work or not.
iPhones do have lots of proprietary chips and custom code to drive them… not sure why (besides for the engineering challenge) you would try to get parts from those…
The Xiao nNRF42840 Sense has MCU+BLE+IMU and is about the size of a die one might toss.
Reset button is a pain in the arse to push, though.
Thanks, I'll look into it! Any recommendations for if I decide to make a bigger dice, maybe the size to fit in one hand comfortably but maybe a similar size to that of a bank card length wise?
I'm doing this project for my degree so a challenge would be most beneficial in regards to getting a good grade
Is it a degree in reuse and repurposing equipment or in hardware/ software engineering?
I’m afraid you’ll get lost into undocumented parts. Apple sells a few hundreds millions phone a year - so they have access to chip customization which might not make sense for ordinary projects
Both. Plus there's the fact that as I'm a student so I have a limited budget so reusing parts works quite nicely for me if its possible. I've managed to identify the parts I'd be working with from the phone. I'll try and list the ones I remember: InvenSense [MP67B] 6-axis Gyroscope and Accelerometer Combo; Bosch Sensortec 3P7 LA 3-axis Accelerometer (likely [BMA280]); Qualcomm [MDM9635M] LTE Cat. 6 Modem; and I'm sure there's some I've forgotten-
Good luck then
Extract the parts without damaging the pads
Figure out how to control them
Write some code.
Any tips for rigging it up? I can def extract them and code will eventually be figured out haha- Like I mentioned I've got a teensy arduino which is what I plan to hook it all up to and worse comes to worse ig I can do a proof of concept and scrap the BT in favour of a cable
You could refer to iPhone 6s Teardown - iFixit
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