| iPhone Remote Keyless Entry? |
As a programmer, and gadget lover, I was wondering today whether or not I could program my iPhone to remotely unlock the doors on my vehicle. I mean, why not? The same chip on the iPhone (well, the 3G-S iPhone at least) that enables Bluetooth™ and WiFi, is also an FM radio transmitter and receiver.
I know there are a few gag apps in the iTunes app store that pretend to unlock your vehicle, but I thought, how hard could it be to write a genuine app?
Well, the truth is it wouldn't be all that hard to write the app if the hardware could do it, and the FM drivers were included as part of the iPhone OS.
Let's start with the driver. In order for the operating system to communicate with (i.e. make use of) the FM transmitter portion of the chip, it would need to know "how" to do that. The "how" is why we would need a driver, since the driver is like a command interface, you tell it what you want it to do, and it goes to the chip and does it. If you don't have the driver, it is like a car with no gas - all the parts are there, but the thing that makes it "go" is missing. The chip is certainly there, but this functionality hasn't been included as part of the OS (as yet).
If the driver to both transmit and receive were present, an iPhone could easily be used as a radio walkman sort of thing, or turned into a rather weak walkie-talkie; or even just transmit your iTunes songs or audio from video to the fm transmitter in your car wirelessly, and without intermediate hardware. You would just turn on your app, transmit to a station (usually around 88 MHz), and then tune in your radio and listen to your iTunes on the radio.
This is all quite do-able, in fact the chip was designed for that sort of stuff. Apple just hasn't enabled it.
Which is why I was thinking that since remote keyless entry systems send their encrypted key pulses through an FM signal; it was possible, in theory at least, if Apple ever got around to including and FM driver in their OS, to write an app that could "read" the signal of your "Fob" then retransmit the same signal from the app. It wouldn't have the range of a standard keyless fob, but it would easily work in the 30 to 40 ft. range.
You will note from this page, that the FM receiver/transmitter (in the chip that resides in an iPhone) operates only in the range of 76MHz to 108MHz; that is, it receives, and can transmit in this narrow band only. But here is the rub: most keyless entry systems in North America work on 315MHZ in North America (433.93MHz in Europe), so even if Apple included drivers to enable the FM transmitting capability of the iPhone, the chip itself could not transmit on a high enough frequency to unlock a door. The best you could do would be, maybe to add a lot of static to someone's nearby radio signal.
Sigh.
That means that, at present at least, it is impossible for a stock iPhone to mimic a vehicular keyless entry system...Labels: FYI, gadgetry, programming |
posted by Daniel @
8:07 AM
7 comment(s)
 
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