iPhone Open Application Development

Vibrating

The iPhone includes a built-in vibrating motor for silently notifying the user of new events. This is controlled by the MeCCA framework, which is a private C++ framework used for low-level communications with various devices including audio, Bluetooth, and other hardware. Daniel Peebles has written a low-level vibration example, which can be wrapped into an application or called as a standalone binary.

To vibrate the iPhone, create an instance of the MeCCA_Vibrator C++ class. The prototype for this class looks like this:

class MeCCA_Vibrator {
public:
    int getDurationMinMax(unsigned int&, unsigned int&);
    int activate(unsigned short);
    int activate(unsigned int, unsigned short);
    int activate(unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned short);
    int deactivate(  );
};

To use this class, first create a new instance of MeCCA_Vibrator:

MeCCA_Vibrator *v = new MeCCA_Vibrator;

The vibrator object's activate and deactivate methods can then be used to control vibration:

v->activate(1);
usleep(DURATION);
v->deactivate(  );

When calling the usleep( ) function, specify the duration, in microseconds, that you would like the vibrator to run for.

To tap into the MeCCA vibrator object, your application must be linked to the MeCCA framework. Using the tool chain, MeCCA can be linked to your application by adding the -framework MeCCA argument to the compiler arguments we described in Chapter 2:

$ arm-apple-darwin-gcc -o MyApp MyApp.m -lobjc \ -framework CoreFoundation \ -framework Foundation \ -framework ...