Remembering back in the early days of the iPod… I had an FM transmitter that plugged into the headphone jack, so I could tune to it and listen to it on the car stereo.
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2nd? 3rd? Generation FM transmitter I had, came with a playlist. Each audio file in the playlist was named for an FM frequency. You would play the “song” on the iPod and the FM transmitter would tune itself to that frequency.
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I never got a degree, I had to drop out, and back then that was a lot less common than it is now. My resume never made it past a lot of HR folks. So I started in on what was a fairly early e-learning program at some university.
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It was a pretty cool program, they let you design your own degree by defining your own learning path. If there wasn’t a class that matched one of your learning objectives, you gave yourself a research and writing assignment, which they would evaluate with a pass/fail.
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So what does that have to do with FM transmitters on old iPods? Well, one of my learning objectives had to do with reverse engineering. So I dug into how the FM transmitter was controlled by the audio files in the playlist.
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Honestly it was pretty easy to figure out. Looking at the waveform in an audio editor, it was a binary number represented by peaks or valleys at regular intervals representing bits.
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I figured out how to bypass the mechanism they used to keep the signal strength below a certain level to conform with FCC regulations
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…not sure there’s a lesson here, but I did have a vague notion of saying something about keeping things as simple as possible. These folks literally used audio as a protocol.
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I mean, think of all the work that would go into a physical interface and display. And would it really be more ergonomic?
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the ipod is a dac that supplies a voltage, nice
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