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Some details on the iPhone 4's GPS chip

Posted by Chris Anderson on November 22, 2010 at 10:48am

People are starting to look seriously at the iPhone 4 as a robotics controller. It's got a full IMU and otherwise looks appealing. You can get all the hardware chip and sensor specs from this excellent iFixIt teardown, but here's just one example: the GPS chip.


It's a Broadcom chip and the refresh rate is "up to 2Hz". The user-accessible data is provided by the OS so the refresh rate in practice may vary, but the hardware looks pretty promising.



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Comments

  • Ron Jacobs November 22, 2010 at 3:06pm
    Oh, that's true. In fact that's what I have and will likely use first is the 1Hz EM406. Does the iPhone have a magnetometer?
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson November 22, 2010 at 2:50pm
    Ron, 2Hz is a bit on the slow side, but we flew for many years with the 1Hz EM406 and that worked fine. I don't think 2Hz is a showstopper at all.
  • Ron Jacobs November 22, 2010 at 2:44pm
    the GPS is only up to 2 Hz. That is a bit slow refresh rate, no? For flying things anyway.
  • Hugo Vincent November 22, 2010 at 2:38pm
    @jeffrey - if only that was true ;-) It remains one of the most locked down pieces of consumer electronics in history. Of course, jailbreaking and writing apps for iOS isn't so bad - you get to use their nice APIs, power management, comms, imaging etc, and technically, iOS is even a real-time operating system.
  • jeffrey November 22, 2010 at 2:33pm
    An iphone is just a computer running linux.. Ofcurse you can flash it and do what ever you want with it.
  • Martin Peres November 22, 2010 at 1:04pm
    Hugo: Interesting. Anyway, an arduino will always be needed to command and get information from the actuators.
  • Hugo Vincent November 22, 2010 at 1:02pm
    I doubt the built-in accelerometers, gyros, and magnetometers are any different *at all* performance-wise from the ones we hobbyists use. iOS even has a built-in sensor fusion (Kalman filter) algorithm perfectly tuned to match the sensors. I personally would guess that most hobbyists achieve worse performance (even with better sensors) due to this professionally designed, coded, and tuned fusion algorithm.
  • Martin Peres November 22, 2010 at 12:21pm
    Well, using smartphones as GUI interfaces, data storage, long-range communication (3G, texts) and computation power (image recognition) for robots is cool. But I doubt the built-in IMU and the accelerometers are accurate-enough for robot positionning.

    I believe in the use of an arduino as an interface between the real world (sensors) and the big brain (that may be a smartphone).

    As for what smartphone will be the most used, I guess it would be an open one with usb-host support for communication.
  • T.D. Gonzales November 22, 2010 at 11:35am
    It seems like you would have to hack it to make sure you can really get access to low level hardware stuff.
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson November 22, 2010 at 11:27am
    Martin: why do say that? It's already used to control the Parrot AR.Drone, and Android phones as robotics controllers are now ubiquitous.
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