repurposing drawer-ware

//CDRIVE DD DSN=MYDISK.IPHONE.PDS,
// UNIT=3330,DISP=SHR,VOL=SER=DISK01 *

Most people including reviewers don't yet have the new iPhone, so their commentary about it has to be on safe ground. All about things like memory size starting at a 'low' 16Gb. 'ring.

I have a different problem.

It's more to do with the residual devices. The ones with flat batteries that live in a drawer.

I've still got at least two older generation iPhones which strike me as perfectly good display devices.

What I'd really like to do is use one as a secondary monitor for the video camera kit that I've been building. There's so much circuitry and logic in any iPhone, that you'd think it could be repurposed. And the bike turbo could use an old iPad as its dedicated display device too.

The thing is, the older devices don't get capabilities needed to make it all work.

Yesterday I decided to put an old style ANT+ connector into my oldest iPad. It mechanically fits, but the software won't recognise it and can't be updated to a high enough version of IOS to fix it.

Instead, I'm continuing to use the oldest iPad as a media controller, plus a clapperboard/slate for the video antics. Although a 32Gb clapperboard does seem excessive.

Say cheese.

*The caption above is the IBM JCL for a once state-of-the-art 30Mb IBM Winchester disk drive used to run whole banking systems on big mainframe computers. That 30Mb equates to around 10 jpeg photos on the new iPhone.