arduinobluetoothios5iphonemfi
After searching on Google, I found that people say it's only possible to connect an iOS device with a non iOS device with the 'MFi program'. Is that true?
My project is mainly focused on sending and receiving information with the Arduino device via Bluetooth directly.
Is communication between iOS and non iOS devices without jailbreak possible? If yes, is there a reference?
(I viewed Stack Overflow question How can an iPhone access another non-iPhone device over wireless or Bluetooth?.)
The only way to communicate with other Bluetooth devices via the External Accessory framework in iPhone OS 3.0 is if they are in the Made for iPod accessory program. Even though they communicate through standard Bluetooth connections, accessories need special hardware in order to process the data stream coming from the iPhone / iPod touch. Unfortunately, this means that your idea of communicating with generic Bluetooth devices won't work on iPhone OS 3.0.
If the devices you want to talk to are Bonjour-discoverable via Wi-Fi, they don't need to be part of the Made for iPod program. However, that doesn't sound like your case.
Third-party developers in the near future may produce dongles that connect through the 30-pin dock port and give access to existing Bluetooth devices. If these developers opened up their communication protocol, that might enable your goal of communicating with these devices.
There are several connection technologies available.
As others have mentioned, standard Bluetooth (3.0) is controlled by the MFi program. The only way to connect to a non-jailbroke iPhone is to join the MFi program.
Serial access is interesting. You have to join MFi to distribute a serial device, but you can use the Redpark Serial Cable to connect your own iPhone to a serial device.
There are several ways to connect Bluetooth LE devices to the Arduino. One I've used is the RedBearLabs BLE Shield. It works pretty darn well.
You can also connect to an Arduino using a WiFi-serial bridge. I've had success with the WiFly device.
One of the neat things about the BLE Shield and WiFly is you don't have to use Objective C or a Macintosh--although that's an option, of course. You can access both through techBASIC, running right on the iPad or iPhone.
You can probably figure these out on your own with some research and effort, but these connection technologies (plus a few more that don't apply directly to Arduino) are also covered in Building iPhone and iPad Electronics Devices, a new book from O'Reilly.
Best Answer
As I stated in the above-linked question, general Bluetooth communication to external devices on non-jailbroken iOS devices is restricted to MFi-compliant Bluetooth hardware.
However, newer iOS devices (iPhone 4S, new iPad) are capable of Bluetooth 4.0 LE communication with external devices without the need for those devices to be MFi-compliant. This interaction is done through the new Core Bluetooth framework, which lets you send and receive arbitrary data to and from Bluetooth LE devices. This only works with those listed newer iOS devices, though.
Tim points out an interesting hack that you might be able to get away with in making your device appear like a Bluetooth HID keyboard. Devices like this barcode scanner have special modes to appear as HID devices to iOS. You might be able to pull something together based on this, but all data transfer will be one-way from your device, and it looks like this will require entering that data into text fields as if you had a keyboard connected.