The majority of accessories for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch uses Apple’s proprietary dock connector, and this means that hardware manufacturers have to pay Apple a license fee to make products using the dock connector.
We have already seen accessories which use the 3.5mm audio jack on the iPhone, like the Square payment system, and now some students at the University of Michigan have created a new accessory for the iPhone that uses the 3.5mm audio jack.
The accessory cost just $2.34 in electronic parts and it includes a working EKG, temperature sensor, humidity sensor and also some motion sensors that can all communicate with a custom iOS app, have a look at the video of it in action below.
Hopefully the students will release the source code so that we can see some other cool accessories using the iPhone’s 3.5mm audio jack instead of the dock connector.
via Ubergizmo