There are a bunch of games that require pushing the same button again and again at a certain frequency and candidly make you feel incredibly stupid. I wanted to figure out an easy way to do this without jailbreaking my iPhone.
Easier said than done! After looking at a lot of solutions, I found the following solution to be the most reliable: https://www.instructables.com/id/Clicker-cheater-for-iPhone-Arduino-from-the-Cucumb/
Long story short, I found that the following pieces comprised a usable solution:
- An Arduino board (I bought mine at a local electronics store but something like https://www.amazon.com/Elegoo-Board-ATmega2560-ATMEGA16U2-Arduino should be fine.
- A servo motor. Something like https://www.amazon.com/Futaba-FUTM0031-S3003-Standard-Servo/dp/B0015H2V7 should be fine.
- A few male-male jumper wires for hooking the servo up to the Arduino board. Something like https://www.amazon.com/SIM-NAT-Solderless-Breadboard-Electronic/dp/B0728C8QHN is fine (overkill but cheap).
Then some things from around the house:
- A disposable chopstick.
- A grape.
- Some tape.
- A small cardboard box.
There are some additional items mentioned on the Instructables page, but the above were honestly all I needed.
The solution can be broken into two parts:
- How do you get the iPhone capacitive touchscreen to respond? (my answer: grounded grape)
- How do you mechanically get the grape to touch the screen at a certain frequency?
To answer #1, I used a wooden chopstick and taped a grape to the end of it. I then stuck one of the male-male wires into the grape and stuck the other end into the digital ground (GND) on the Arduino. I then tested it by holding onto the wooden chopstick and touching my iPhone screen with it.
Note, the reason this works is because the grape has approximately the same capacitive characteristics as a human finger (about the same size, etc.). The wire to ground is necessary to ground the charges coming out of the capacitive screen. Reference: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/23036/how-can-a-capacitive-touch-screen-be-triggered-without-human-contact
To answer #2, I bought the Arduino board and simply used the algorithm used in Sweep: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Sweep . This simply moves the servo motor up and down. I didn’t need as much movement as is seen in Sweep, though, so I simply modified it so that the steps were 0 to 20 (about 20 degrees up, 20 degrees down)– a light finger tap. To understand exactly what Sweep does on an Arduino board, look at any Youtube video– e.g. this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OQzgxtjj5k
Given #1 and #2, the rest was easy. I screwed the chopstick into the servo motor for stability, cut a hole in the box to create as stable base for the servo motor, stuck a wine bottle into the box for extra weight and stability, and that was pretty much it!
Some notes:
- At first, I didn’t try this solution because I was unfamiliar with the Arduino. The Arduino is super duper easy and super duper awesome. I used the Mac OS X Arduino IDE but it is available on all major OS’s. You can install it from here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage
- The touch seemed to work a little more reliably when I put a drop of water on the screen for the grape to touch. I also hear that carrots and cucumbers work well. Totally up to you to try different things!
The above picture is how mine turned out. I could clean it up a ton but it’s fine for now– hopefully you get the picture. As you can see, the servo is embedded in a hole cut in the cardboard box; the Arduino is in the box too, and the big thick gray wire is the USB cable coming from my computer to the Arduino. The black ground wire is stuck in the grape and goes to GND on the Arduino. The iPhone is taped to the countertop. That’s it! And yes, I’m a geek.
earth album 