USB keyboard works with Ipad 2 strange

[Brockly]

This is a bit off topic but I'm just gonna ask anw. Im planning to get a 16gb iPad 2 and thinking of expanding its storage with sd card or usb stick, but I hv read a few post saying the problem with iPad 2's power output. So since you have the powered usb hub, could you try to connect a thumbdrive to iPad 2? I know this could be done with iPad 1 but given the reduced voltage thingy that Apple did to iPad 2, this is no longer possible.
Thanks

I herd about using the sd card with the camera so I got a female to female and tried to hook a USB keyboard and it didn't work

 

[DontUnderstandMyIpad]

I herd about using the sd card with the camera so I got a female to female and tried to hook a USB keyboard and it didn't work

Female to female? What did you need that for? USB-keyboards usually come with a male USB-plug, which goes straight into the camera connector kit.

 

[Brockly]

Female to female? What did you need that for? USB-keyboards usually come with a male USB-plug, which goes straight into the camera connector kit.

I didn't have a camera connector so I hook it up to a power cord

 

[madhatter61]

@madhatter: yeah you're right, i should hv been more precise. What i meant is to read off usb and all. It'd be great before a long trip or sth to have an extra storage for movies from which you can load into you iPad.
@Dontunderstand: so basically you can only use your kingston usb in both iPads, not the external hard drive though?

The issue is most external backup drives are formatted in NTFS ... works great for PC's... Mac can read NTFS but does not write. (Apple never took out the license from Microsoft to do that) ... Mac writes to HFS+ format. That is why time machine needs the latter format.

Now when trying to use the external drive ... if it is not fat32 (like most thumb drives use) and you also need all your files stored in the specific Camera File named DCIM ... then iOS only considers .jpg and .mov. I may be wrong on just .mov for movies. I do know that Mac does not do AVCHD from Sony direct ... it has to be converted to MOV or MOB.

Initially I tried to transfer Photo files from iPhoto on my Mac mini to iPad2. I couldn't get it to work. Instead I got the Camera Connector kit ... plugged in my 8 GB SD card from my Panasonic Lumix camera ... and voila ... iPad2 recognized it immediately ... took about 5 minutes or less to transfer 900 photos. I have since learned you can do the same thing with movies. However, Larger SD cards get expensive. That is one reason we chose the 64 GB SSD drive on the iPad2. It is faster than SD cards. I am just learning about all the ways to get data in and out of the iPad2. I appreciate solid info. Thanks in advance.

 

[madhatter61]

Ok that's great... it's gonna be too much to ask here but if you can partition your hard drive with a small partition in Fat32, we could find out.. but it's just a thought though.

Yes, you can certainly add a additional partitions to a harddrive ... i.e. Fat32. and on a std. PC or Mac those OS's we readily read the partitions and post the drives so you can see them.

I don't think the iPad OS does that. So I don't know how you would differentiate one partition from another. The apps do their own thing, and we usually don't have any input control. It depends on the app. The iOS manages the apps and all the utility functions, but it is quite different than x86 architecture.

In the PC world all the different formats is what makes it so complicated sometimes. With iOS Apple is unique in that their is only their OS to deal with... and their hardware. So it is all finely tuned. I think this is why so many nerd hate iTunes, because iTunes does Apple beautifully, but doesn't recognize or handle all of their work arounds in ripping tunes, movies and the like. iTunes is really misnamed in my opinion. It should be something like iSync and Xfer. Apple has a very tightly controlled database scheme that is managed my iTunes. There is an interesting post yesterday by John Gruber (daringfireball.com) re: "cutting the cord". It spells out 4 key issues that are really important. Some posted they didn't like how long it took to update to 4.3.2. It took me over 3 hours via my Mi-Fi router. Apple doesn't just insert or remove code. It replaces the entire iOS... so it is guaranteed to be complete with no fragments of this or that. It is not that they are always perfect ... OS's are always a work in progress. But Apple does pay attention and does upgrade regularly. They don't like or want jail break because they are not always carefully reviewed and it takes a very savvy person to stay on top of JB fooling around. Some do it for the challenge ... the rest of us just want to use it ...

 

[DontUnderstandMyIpad]

Well, the test hard drive has a NFTS and a Fat32 partition, with the Fat32 containing a DCIM folder with some images, but iOs doesn't recognize any device connected.

 

[nguyen]

oh well then, i guess we can only do it with thumb drive.
Thanks for helping me out guys

 

[tzimisce]

Well, the keyboard did not work with the initial iPad 2, but now works with the replacement i2. So considering the current drawn by the keyboard stayed the same, it is not entirely clear, why the keyboard did not work initially.

I can use a no-brand Taiwanese-made ergonomic keyboard with the camera connector on my iPad (1st gen) running 4.3.1, and I've noticed that maybe 1 out of maybe 10 times the keyboard will not work. However after disconnecting and reconnecting again, it will work on a subsequent attempt. I have used the same keyboard successfully on two different iPads.

Also, I've tried 9 different keyboards using the camera connector, and half of them absolutely will not work, and the rest do work some or most of the time (as above.)