Apple's Lightning port dynamically assigns pins to allow for reversible use - Page 2

Thanks. I mean it makes perfect sense, of course. Every adapter Apple currently offers will at some point have to be updated for the Lightening port.

I'm not sure why people are so bent out of shape about this connector. Having seen it in the Apple store, I'm very impressed with it ... Long overdue once you see it. The whole issue of digital driving up the cost of docks is also kind of silly, since the whole reason I buy a dock is to get direct digital quality. The analogue docks I have suck. By all means charge me a little more and give me a higher quality DAC in the dock than they affordably can cram in the iPhone, or an adapter.

I just hope somebody makes a 9-pin to 30-pin adapter so that I can forward-invest in the new docks, rather than continue to buy old docks, until I upgrade.

Ok, this is kinda trivial. But there are at least 4 people here referring to the "Lightening" port. It is Apple and not Weight Watchers that we are discussing?

 

Ah, thank you. Finally someone who posts reasonable analysis on their blog.

 

Incidentally, if you look at the ribbon cable that the jack is connected to, there are some additional assumptions that can be made. In its current implementation, there clearly only appear to be two differential signaling pairs. I'm pretty sure we can also safely assume that there will always be voltage and ground connections in the mix. So there are 6 of your 8 pins. My prediction is that the other two are hot plug detect and system clock for a SlimPort like implementation.

 

It does appear that the two differential signaling pairs can be used adaptively, but I really don't think we'll see much more than USB 2.0 OTG and digital audio/video from the first round of iDevices to use Lightning. Don't forget that even the new nano uses this interface. While it is Apple's connector and they can do whatever they want with the pin assignments, they do have to maintain a certain degree of continuity going forward so that the millions of devices and peripherals already in the wild with this interface will continue to function somewhat predictably.

The best bit that came out of this is it is dynamically assigned digital pins. It mean there should be interesting lightning related products in the near future that an analog 30-pin cable cannot do. That chip could serve many purposes we just don't know yet.

i got a question. according to peter's mapping above, there is no (V+) power line fixed to any of lighting connector pins. If the iphone5 is entirely out of battery energy, how will iphone5 communicate with the cable and assign the pin for the (V+) to get itself charged?

This cable is clearly designed to be flexible, and to be able to handle multiple different types of output. So turning an 8-connector cable into a hardwired mirrored 4-connector cable would not be advantageous. I am very happy that Apple chose not to use the terrible micro-USB connector that seems to have become so widespread--it is fragile (particularly for use in a dock, where it needs to support at least some of the weight of the device) and not reversible (and the correct orientation is hard to discern by eye because it is so small). In fact, I hope that Apple offers Lightning for licensing, and that other manufacturers adopt it as well--I'd like to see micro-USB go the way of Flash and the floppy disk.

I've got a few questions on this topic.

I hope, you get my thoughts, because my English is not that good...

 

I own a nice bike charging device for my old iPhone 4 and it always worked as advertised with the old 30-pin connector. Now i bought an iPhone 5 with the new lightning connector.

 

The problem is, that the charger only offers two wires, when i cut off the 30pin connector: black and yellow.. I guess GND and +5V.

I opened up the old 30pin connector and there are a few resistors inside..?!

Now I thought, connecting a lightning cable connected to these two wires would just work out.. but it didn't.

 

How do I have to connect the the two power wires from the bike charging device to an opened lightning cable with four wires? (standard USB ones, i think) is there a tutorial for that?

Edited by David Berger - 4/30/13 at 5:43am