In early October, 2point5 launched Material6, a line of handcrafted wood inlay iPhone 4 backs designed to remove the easily scratched and cracked original glass iPhone 4 backplate and replace it with a completely new backplate made from all OEM parts with the glass being replaced by a solid wood panel that comes in three finishes. These replacement backs truly look and feel amazing, and really enhance the iPhone 4’s original design and beauty without compromising any of the device’s features! Each Material6 back is assembled by hand from three primary pieces:

An OEM iPhone 4 back frame - note that the screw standoffs are made of metal. Many knockoff parts have plastic screw standoffs which don’t work as well as the original design.

An OEM camera lens with a polished metal ring and real glass lens - knockoffs will have a plastic lens, which is easily damaged!

A hand-finished piece of solid wood veneer that is precision sanded, sealed, cut, drilled and mounted to exacting specifications. The wood panel is precisely the same size and thickness (1mm) of the original glass, with the camera and lens holes being drilled by a milling machine in locations that are accurate to one-hundreth of a millimeter.

These components, along with a protective flash lens and high-strength adhesive, are all assembled by craftsmen to form a complete replacement for your iPhone 4’s original glass backplate. Each package includes a complete back, #00 precision screwdriver and illustrated instructions for the swap, which can be performed in less than two minutes!

We’re very excited to offer this product to discerning iPhone 4 owners worldwide via the Material6 online store, and look forward to making our customers’ iPhone 4 experience even better! Let us know if you have any questions concerning our new offerings, and we thank you for checking it out. You can find us as well on Facebook and Twitter. As always - more to come. Stay tuned…

New iPhone 4 inserts are available - our shipments should be in Monday, so let us know if you need one…individual inserts are $4/ea to make your spec.dock work perfectly with your new iPhone. They are also available at your local Apple store or online in a 3-pack:

Apple Store Link

or

2point5 Link

We’re also getting two iPhone 4 units in our hands Thursday to test them with the spec.dock and all the interface options we offer to make sure there are no hiccups! Stay tuned for any issues we uncover, but we’re expecting this to be an easy upgrade…

Update 06/24/10

We got our hands on an iPhone 4 to run some tests with this morning, and can confirm that DICE, Dension and USASpec all work perfectly with the new device, including no charging issues whatsoever! If you never upgraded your spec.dock between the release of the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G, this would be the only time you’ll have charging issues, as the iPhone 4 (just like the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS) charges via USB power only. All iPod functions, song text, etc. work just as they should. So, if you were already set up and good to go with anything but the first-gen iPhone, you’ll be able to use your new device in your spec.dock with no problems.

On a side note, Apple changed the warning message in iOS4 so that the wording and message is a little clearer when you connect to a device that does not utilize the Apple Authentication Chip:

As before, this is just a message from Apple about potential noise issues that never actually seem to be a problem - just click dismiss and keep on using your iPhone or iPod like normal. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, and we’ll update as any new information comes in!

You still get the “This accessory not made to work with iPhone” message about GSM noise (see posts below), but there is no mention of charging issues via the iPhone 3G itself.

Update 08/03/09:

Pictured below is the new white-ended cable.

So, this one really doesn’t have much to do with 2point5, but I did use our facilities and many of the techniques we’ve learned over the years to see this one through. Just thought I’d post up the process photos with some description for the perusal of those out there who are curious! This Saturday is the fourth iteration of the SK8 or DIE show at YoungBlood Gallery in Atlanta, in which a certain number of artists and skaters are given a blank deck to do with whatever they see fit. This year, there are 106 artists and boards represented, and it should be a great show, so swing by if you’re in town! Now, let’s get down to it:

Here’s where the process began. I bought a few plastic bowls and picked the two that most closely represented the shallow and deep ends of a peanut-shaped backyard pool. Of course, they also had to fit within the confines of the board itself, which is roughly 7″ wide. I cut the two to fit together roughly, then glued them to a piece of 1/4″ MDF. I followed this up by using clay to smooth out the seams between the two bowls and the wood base. Finally, the entire mold was coated multiple times with wax to ensure that the fiberglass cast popped right off when it was done curing.

To make the fiberglass casting, I began by coating the mold with resin using a paintbrush, then went back in with three individual layers of long-strand fiberglass mat torn into small rough pieces to ensure full saturation of the mat with resin. Each layer was applied piece-by-piece and then wet down using more resin and a paintbrush. I finished the casting off with short-strand fiberglass to mimic the look of a prefab pool base.

This cured overnight, and popped off the mold easily the next day with minimal effort.

I then used an old trick with an oversized router bearing and Sharpie to draw a line about 3/4″ away from the edge of the “pool” and simply cut away the excess with an airsaw and a right-angle die-grinder. A little 80-grit sandpaper was used to finish out the edges.

Right off the bat, I didn’t feel like the shallow end was shallow enough to make a good transition to the deep end, so I cut and added a piece of 1/4″ acrylic to increase the distance between the two halves of the pool.

This piece and the rest of the pool were smoothed and finished out using Rage Gold body filler and a lot of tiny pieces of 80-grit sandpaper.

The stairs were also added in using small pieces of 1/4″ acrylic during this process and blended into the pool using Metal Glaze spot filler and some more small pieces of sandpaper.

Before I could attach the fiberglass casting to the board itself, the board needed to be widened about 3/4″ larger than the diameter of the deep end to ensure that the board stayed in one piece as I cut the opening, and for cosmetic reasons. I accomplished this by using aluminum foil tape to make a temporary mold of the shape I needed and filling it with more Rage Gold body filler. This was then rough-sanded in preparation for the next step…

Which was to glue and airnail the fiberglass casting to the board from the backside before roughly cutting out the opening in the board with an airsaw.

Next, I flipped the board face-down on our table-mounted router, and cut the opening perfectly with a 1/4″ spiral flush-trim bit. This bit has a bearing that rides on a surface (in this case, the edge of the fiberglass casting) and cuts to match the spot the bearing is riding on.

You may have noticed in the previous image that there was quite a gap between the fiberglass casting (which has a flat outer edge) and the hole in the board (which is convex when viewed from the bottomside like we are here). This gap was again filled with Rage Gold body filler and some more sanding, as were the remaining nail holes and any other imperfections in the board or castings’ surfaces.

So, this part was pretty tricky. First, I needed to find flexible plastic rod about 1/8″ in diameter to form the edge of the pool’s coping. I considered a number of materials like stainless steel or wire before settling on plastic weed-eater string I found at our local Ace Hardware. This material proved perfect for its look, but also its flexibility and adhesion to the cyanoacrylate adhesive I used to attach it around the perimeter of the opening. Before attaching the “coping” I used a very small rabbet bit to cut a 1/16″ channel around the perimeter of the opening to consistently seat the plastic string into. As I went around the pool, I glued and taped small sections at a time to keep everything in place.

After a good look around to make sure I didn’t miss any flaws in the board, fiberglass, acrylic or body filler, I got to do my favorite step, which was to prime the entire board with a nice, heavy coat of Fetherfill G2 Epoxy Primer. It is a 2-part catalyzed primer that is nearly a liquid body filler, which saved a lot of time filling sanding scratches and any small gaps between all the components of the board. It hardens very well, and requires very little finish sanding before moving on to paint.

While the primer was curing (which takes 12-24 hours), I turned my attention to the small details that no pool can do without! I used a small incandescent 5V light bulb and a stainless steel washer to create the pool light, a piece of 1/4″ acrylic and some 1/8″ stainless steel tubing to make the diving board and I pressed the drain using a faucet screen, center punch, hammer and socket.

Here is a shot of the board after the surface was sanded down to 1000-grit smoothness, and after the holes were made to receive the pool light, diving board and drain. At this point, the board was ready for painting

Before I could paint the face of the board, however, I needed to clean up the backside with body filler, more sandpaper and satin-black paint…

The board has three different types of paint on it to simulate both the color and texture of the materials used in a typical backyard pool, so the painting process took a couple of days of masking, painting, unmasking, waiting for paint to dry, remasking, painting, etc. A great help in this process was having a couple of different types of fineline tape (plastic and paper), as well as masking paper and tape ranging from 3/4″ to 4″.

The last steps involved installing roughly 60 “tiles” around the permieter of the pool (these are actually self-adhesive scrapbooking letters painted blue), installing the pool light, diving board and drain.

The light is functional, and takes two “N” sized batteries, which are replaceable. I also put in a switch so that the light could be turned off without removing the batteries or unhanging it from the wall.

…and there she is.

If you’ve made it all the way through this, and are around, please come by to support all the artists who put their time into making this show possible, and thank you so much for checking it out…I can’t wait to see what the other 105 boards look like!

We get this question more often than we would like:

“Will my iPod or iPhone fall out of the dock while I’m driving?”

Our answer is always a definitive no, followed by an explanation on our part that the 30-pin connector does most of the job of keeping the device in place, and that we’ve thoroughly tested this theory by not only driving our cars over the past three years with spec.docks installed, but also by intentionally trying to make this happen by doing doughnuts, j-turns, quick stops/starts…you get the picture. It is pretty much inconceivable that an iPod or iPhone in a spec.dock will go flying through the passenger compartment during any type of driving - erratic or otherwise. We’ve even had a few customers get in pretty major accidents, and when the smoke cleared the iPod or iPhone was still in the dock, playing happily as if nothing happened. And yet, we still get the question from time to time. So, we decided to answer it once and for all…We’ve been kicking around the idea of shooting a commercial for some time now, and have had some decent ideas as far as the content was concerned, but then we attended a Southeast Drift event a few weeks ago at Turner Field, where we saw a Jodin LeJeune’s Supercharged Nissan Titan V8-powered G35, built by Drift Emporium here in Georgia destroying the track and multiple sets of BF Goodrich tires, and the light bulb went off…we had found the star of our commercial. What better way to show how stable an iPod or iPhone is in the spec.dock than by installing one in a drift car and shooting the results in real time?!

It took a month or two of planning to get everything and everybody in the right place at the right time, but we ended up with two cars, three sets of tires, twenty people, a RED ONE camera with multiple lenses, an oval track, a spec.dock, a director, a mountain of gear and an iPhone last Saturday, and the results will speak for themselves once the final cut is released! Having been there (and driving the chase car), I can say without a doubt that this is going to be a very nice and fun to watch spot…and no, the iPhone did not come out of the dock. At all. Please stay tuned for the release of the finished product here and everywhere!

2point5 would like to send a very hefty thank you to:

Tom Bingham of cfilm1 and all the crew,
John and Jodin LeJeune of Drift Emporium,
Adam Perling of BlackJack Frame Machine,
Dan Elliott of Gresham Motorsports Park
and everyone else who made this happen!

As always, more to come…

As some of you may know, I installed a MacMini in my 2001 Volkswagen GTI a little less than three years ago, and received an enormous amount of press, praise and support of the project over the years since then. The car ended up being featured in a number of print and online publications, my blog was Slashdotted (requiring purchasing a lot more hosting) and - most importantly - the buzz around the project way back when gave myself and my business partner the necessary push to quit our jobs and go full-time with 2point5, not to mention booth space at Macworld 2006 to premier spec.dock - our company’s iPod/iPhone integration product - alongside the GTI in San Francisco. It’s been a little like a strange dream come true to have the MacMini installed in the car since then, making it simple to access my entire music collection, surf the internet, check mail, etc…However, I recently realized that I have ended up mostly using the MacMini only for music and some video, but not much more. Further, it has become a bit of a chore to keep my primary computer and the car’s computer in sync and up to date with each other via file transfers. Also, my iPhone 3G has taken over a lot of this functionality, allowing me to continue listening to music via the MacMini, while keeping up with emails and the occasional website (when I’m at a red light, of course)!

So, I decided it was time to switch it up a little and update the GTI with some new Apple componentry that would solve the issues mentioned above which presented themselves over the past few years as our company and Apple’s product lineup has grown…What device could I replace the MacMini with that was solely dedicated to audio and video, but that would also be easy to control in an automotive environment and simple to update whenever I made change to the iTunes library on my primary computer? You likely already have a good idea that I’m referring to an Apple TV.

In this post, I’m going to detail briefly the process of integrating the Apple Remote into my GTI’s shift knob - a device that I’m becoming increasingly familiar with through mods such as this and this. Since there’s no longer anything in my dash besides the climate controls and a 7″ LCD monitor, I figured that the shift knob was the most ideal place for the remote, since my hand’s on it 75% of the time I’m driving around town anyway!

I began by completely gutting one remote and cutting down the portion of the circuit board dedicated to the five primary control buttons - left, right, up, down and play/pause - into a circular shape that would fit inside the top of my pre-existing Momo shift knob after removing the aluminum insert in the top of the knob and using a Forstner bit to remove as much material as I could while still retaining the strength, shape and functionality of the top portion of the knob itself. I then carefully soldered five wires onto the back of the board where the contacts for these five buttons trace back to the output of the remote, adding in a sixth wire for ground, which all the buttons short to when they are pressed.

The wiring I used is a 12″ section of Alpine Ai-Net cable, which just happens to have six wires inside of an outer shield that turned out to be perfect for protecting the small-gauge wires as they run from the shift knob down the shift lever and into the center console - but more on that later. Once the functionality of these five buttons was confirmed and reconfirmed with a multimeter, I insulated the back of the board with 400-degree hot-melt adhesive we use in the assembly of the spec.dock product.

The next step was absolutely the most tedious and frightening, as it involved a lot of cutting oil and milling out the original aluminum trim from the top of the shift knob to accommodate the Apple Remote’s buttons, but I am pretty familiar at this point with aluminum fabrication, so it went pretty much according to plan - luckily, since I only had one shot at it! I used our endmill to drill the appropriate-sized hole through the middle of the aluminum disc, and then switched the bit out for a 45-degree chamfer bit to remove the remaining material required to countersink the buttons into the trim piece. This not only looks pretty nice and matches the dash bezel I made, but ensures that the buttons aren’t ever accidentally pressed while I’m shifting. I then assembled the aluminum ring, buttons and circuit board temporarily with more hot-melt adhesive.

Then, it was back to the endmill one more time to create a channel inside the steel and hardwood shift knob itself for the Alpine Ai-Net cable to run through.

Before assembling the knob and remote into a single piece that could go back into the GTI, I split the knob into its bottom and top halves and stripped the original perforated leather off, as it was looking pretty worn after eight years of use! I recovered this portion of the knob with black suede to match some other accents I have added to the car over the years. All four pieces were then permanently reassembled with cyanoacrylate adhesive and the hot-melt adhesive I mentioned earlier. This not only insulates all the contacts, but essentially molds to the inside of the knob, creating both structure and adhesion to keep everything tight and functional.

The Alpine cable was simply wire-tied to the shift lever and substructure (making sure there was enough slack for the lever to operate properly) after remounting the shift knob with the three original allen-head set screws that held it in place all these years. This cable is routed to a second Apple remote hidden in the console which actually performs the transmitting functions to the Apple TV (more on this in a later post).

So how about the menu button? I already had an empty switch blank on the dash where the MacMini’s power button and status LED used to reside, so I simply took the remaining piece of the circuit board from the original Apple remote, soldered two wires to it to make the connection points, mounted it in a new switch blank and routed these wires as well to the transmitting remote in the center console.

I’ll be making a few more posts over the next week or so with the other details of this new project such as mounting the Apple TV itself, power supply and image conversion (composite to VGA), but I can tell you thus far it has been a real pleasure to simply click through songs, videos and photos without having to operate a touchscreen, trackpad, PowerMate control knob and the like! The interface looks amazing on the screen as well, since my MacMini was the first model released and did not have the infrared eye or FrontRow installed, so I’m used to browsing a huge iTunes library on a 7″ screen! The best part so far, however, has been that I simply drive up to work and leave the car turned on for ten minutes or so inside the bay while the Apple TV and my office computer sync automatically and wirelessly - a far cry from the process I had to go through before…So, enjoy, and thank you for reading - I wouldn’t be able to do any of this fun stuff if it wasn’t for you guys (and gals), so believe that I appreciate all of your support! More to come…

A few months ago, I built an Apple TV remote into an NES controller for a friend of mine in appreciation for some graphic design work he did for the company, and I was very pleased with the results, so I decided that a perfect Christmas gift for another friend would be an Apple TV remote in a different piece of old tech. My original thought was to get an Atari 2600 controller and add a button to the top of the joystick to give full access to the Apple Remote’s features, but I wasn’t able to find one in time, so I decided that an Atari 2600 cartridge might actually be a more interesting choice, since there is plenty of room and I could modify the labels to reflect the repurposing of the cartridge! I scanned the original Asteroids labels and artwork, made a few subtle changes, then printed them out and (after much scraping and grinding) removed the old labels to make room for the new ones. Integrating the Apple Remote worked out nicely as well, and only required milling down the face of the remote, cutting some precise holes here and there, and carefully assembling the whole thing. I made sure - as I did with the NES Remote - to allow for easy replacement of the battery so that the end user wouldn’t ever have to disassemble the final piece for maintenance. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and the gift was truly appreciated! Happy Holidays to all, and stay tuned…

We’re pleased to announce our holiday promotion for 2008, which begins today and runs through January 15, 2009! We tried to make it really simple - no rebates, just a simple $25 of anything in the online store using promotional code “XMAS” during checkout, or free installation for our Atlanta customers…Check it out, and please contact us with any questions! Happy holidays to everyone, and we hope to hear from you soon!