« Ruby on Rails and Reporting at Boston MySQL Meetup | Main | All Systems Go for MySQL Conference »
March 21, 2007
The 17-foot iPod Dock Extension
It's been a few weeks since I first posted about the iPod Dock Extender Cable I hacked together. Since then I've sold a few of these through CableJive, which gives me a good excuse to play with the soldering iron and som every tiny soldering points in the evening after the kids are asleep.
I recently got an email from a fellow in Sweden who was looking to put an extension in his car and wondered if there was any chance an extension cable would work properly if it were 17 feet long.
Seemed like an interesting enough experiment. I figured at some point it would be good to know the upper limits of this hack. So I cut a length of cable, attached the necessary adapters, and plugged it in to see if the iPod worked 17 feet away from my SoundDock.
The answer is yes, it works.
Now you must note that the dock extender cable featured in my hack only connects power, control, and sound from the iPod. If you were attempting to do video across 17 feet of 28 AWG wire the picture would probably not be so great. But the sound is good, and power and iPod control come through just fine. I broke out the multi-tester for some hard proof just to be sure the voltages were still correct on the far end of the cable.
With that good news I shipped the cable off. Somewhere in Sweden there's a car with an iPod in the front seat and an iPod dock and stereo in the trunk.
Magically connected.
Posted by mike at March 21, 2007 8:49 PM
Comments
Crazy swedes...:-) and they have even bigger cars than in US? Have you tried USB over this distance as well?
Posted by: Ridax at March 24, 2007 10:04 AM
I would like to connect an iPod docking station to my stereo, which is about 25' away. Is it possible to make a workable cable this length and are you the guy to do for me?
Posted by: SR Drew at February 17, 2009 2:09 PM
I'm disappointed that the CableJive extender does not include the stereo audio inputs. Is it possible to find one that does? Or, actually, i was just going to hack it open so I can connect my own stereo microphone to it (via a preamp if necessary). So if such an adapter cable already exists, that would be ideal. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Howard
Posted by: Howard at July 4, 2009 10:08 PM