Hijacking power and bandwidth from the mobile phone's audio interface

Abstract

The mobile phone is the most pervasive personal communications and computing platform ever created and yet, among its various analog interfaces, only one is open, standardized, and widely accessible: the headset port. In this demo, we augmente the mobile phone with a range of phone-powered peripherals. We show that the mobile phone headset port can be used to efficiently power external peripherals and communicate with them, enabling many new phone-centric applications. But, why use the headset port at all? One reason is that it is an open, simple, and ubiquitous interface with documented electrical and mechanical specifications. Perhaps even more important, the headset interface is backward-and forward-compatible with most mobile phones in use today.