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Comment by vermon | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! I thought maybe I'll take a crack at building a better iOS application for these things, but then I remembered that for the Lightning connector you needed to get the permission of the manufacturer if you wanted to interface with a device (tried that once with a Lightning Yubikey and luckily they didn't have any objections). Is this not an issue anymore with USBC iPhones?

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USB-C iPhones work with all kinds of USB-C hubs, devices, keyboards, mice, Ethernet adapters, etc out of the box.

As far as I have seen, USB-C on iOS devices has no authentication restrictions for anything.

The device in the article already has an iOS app, so while there may be a needed app entitlement, I don't think there are any showstoppers for making an iOS app for this particular thermal camera.

I would love to be wrong, but I can't find anything that suggests USB webcams work on USB-C iPhones - I did try in the past for different reasons but couldn't find any way of making it work.

Some USB-C thermal imagers do claim to work, for example this one by HIKMICRO - https://www.hikmicrotech.com/en_us/industrial-products/mini2... - but I'm not sure how...

You are correct. I have the same camera as OP (v1?) but the usbc version does not work with iOS. Can’t understand why. It’s very infuriating.

What surprised me is that iPadOS does have uvc functionality, but iOS doesn't. If you have an ipad with a USBC connector, can try it and will work. For example I used the Orion app for ipad and it will show me live feed of any connected uvc camera.

https://orion.tube/

I built an interposer board to do this about 5 years ago (for a product that didn't go anywhere). Ended up using a beagle bone in USB gadget mode to expose an Ethernet adapter to the iPad I was using.

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