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Homebrewed In-Dash CD-ROM Player
DrD8m writes: "Hardware is changing faster every day, It's very sad to throw away old hardware. This is an example for recyclying it. It's a Computer Audio CD Car Player HOWTO. Using an old computer CD drive in your car. Easy to do and Cool!
Are there any projects like this? I'm sure there are, but I don't want to be a N.A.S.A. engineer to do it." This is the best kind of online instruction -- well-illustrated, no guarantees, creative re-use.
We work fast so your site wont.
This is so why we should drive cars made out of Nerf(TM). Accidents become enjoyable.
This site is much better for professional in-dash MP3 radios.
http://www.highwaymp3.com
As we all know from our dealings with Cue-Cat, it's illegal to use a product under the DMCA in a way not originally intended. Shame, Shame! This sort of abuse of the EUA is going to hurt inovation!
I used to work at pcliquidator.com go there, they always have cheap used stuff. Lots of CDROMs from what I remember. Neil
A friend of mine put an old CD-ROM into his car about 2-3 years agao and it works perfectly. He has an very old diesel car and he drives on dirt roads ect yet he claims that it never skips or jumps. I can confirm that there was no skipping on normal roads as I heard it saw it working. He also never had any protection such as foam or whatever to absorb shock. I could not access the article so I am not sure about the way they did it but basicly my friend just hooked it up to a 12v power supply and wire from the phones jack to a small amp.
P.S. Does anyone have any ideas for those 8086's? :)
Paperweights.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Yeah, and we know how the P4 manages such impressive heat characteristics.
Car CD players are usually built to withstand shock, whereas my CD-ROM drive tends to skip when jostled. Is there a way to dampen the shocks from pot-holes, etc. when using a CD-ROM drive in a car? (I don't know if the site in question answers this as it seems to be slashdotted.)
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
You could argue that the bulk of that $1200 is for R&D, hardware, etc. However, the 60G version is $2200. So, they are charging you $1000 to upgrade the standard notebook hard drive. Pure theft.
...or perharps you should just go WLAN... =)
I mean, sure, it's geeky and all, and it uses a piece of old hardware, but I think this is a lot cooler
Empeg, as it started out in a homebrew fashion, is far more interesting device. Seems that Diamond has purchased that though, as it's now the RioCar.
Kind of like how humans normally work, eh?
Find something good. Swarm the fucker. Obliterate it. Repeat.
Happened to California. Brazilian forests. Passenger pigeons. Baby seals. Whale oil. Etcetera.
We're almost like not-very-smart viruses. (Not very smart because, after all, most viruses don't actually kill their host.)
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
And if it isn't playing a CD, the cd tray can hold your mocha frappachino.
I've been thinking about this for a while now:
Why don't we do something with the heat generated by our computers? Our machines use huge amounts of electricity, and a lot of that energy is converted to heat which is then just wasted. Isn't there some way we can reuse this heat to produce more electricity? I thought I read something about an invention Nasa made that would convert heat to electricity... this would be certainly nice for those dual 1.8 Ghz systems, not only conserving energy use but making them run cooler as well.
Just a thought.
-- sudo.ca
Theres a bunch of good reasons why not to..
a) Legality, say the information contained on the site is illegal (DeCSS), or maybe the site's author doesn't want to have it mirrored. Especially if the person depends on the ad revenue.
b) Doesn't work all the time, say the website is dynamic, like that Perl to Flash website. There's no way to mirror that easily. Or the mechanical counter. etc.
c) Its not the freshest information, the author could decide to revise the information. But the mirror might not reflect that.
d) What to mirror, what not to mirror. Lets say that a site makes use of a lot of links to other sites, do you mirror those as well, and the links on those sites?
Sometimes the internet doesn't work the way you want to, if this bothers you so much, you can devote your time to making a way to mirror sites mentioned on slashdot before they get slashdotted.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
Windows also freaks out when it doesn't see the hardware it expects. I had to re-enable the IDE ports on my PC (all SCSI machine) to get Windows 98 to install on it because the IDE drivers kept loading and hooking onto the SCSI interrupts hanging the box. Once 98 was installed I re-disabled the IDE ports and all was fine.
Doesn't support VBR, unfortunatly, so I was forced to go with the Aiwa. At least someone makes stuff like this.
There is no federal parole.
The RIAA needs to investigate this assertion that data is copied in digial format into consumer CD player memory, sometimes MORE THAN ONCE!
This is a blatant violation of the copywrite holder's rights.
This is THEFT pure and simple.
Geez, forget your midol this morning???
The power is very noisy and not very consistant. Voltages from 9V up to around 15V are 'normal'. The ignition noise is probably much more.
You will need some sort of power supply to power a CDROM or any other device not meant for car power (Unless it is something really simple like a light or a motor.)
And it's very simplistic... but.. I was hoping that someone had taken the initiative to actually make it look nice in the car (imagine having a nice black face, tray loading car CD player). Also, it could even be hooked into a laptop/desktop style machine for data reading...
(I know, the article stated "bad CD rom drives, but hey, here's hoping).
If I had the time, I'd find an older thinkpad drive that reads CDR's and CDRW's fine, and use it in the dash, and put an led/lcd panel up front to control it (or a computer).
Karnal
For the money he spent on that system, he could have easily gotten a WRX.
(Okay, maybe it wasn't available at the time, but still...)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No one would ever parole him. Get a grip. I for one could not kill a helpless person straped to a table.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Anyway, about those XT-class parts - depending on just how many extra boards you have... [never tried it, but I do believe it's possible] feed that 8086 machine an EMS memory card >= 1mb, an 8-bit network card, at least an EGA monitor, and about 20 megs of HD and you can use it as a (slow? probably) WWW-surfing box with Arachne.
Of course, you're talking to the guy who still plays with the "modulate some frequency in the TRS-80 so it plays tunes in the static of an AM radio" program once in a while... lol =]
BRTB
God forbid actually bothering to discuss this with the site owner before posting the article. At least give them the option of mirroring it before the inevitable onslaught.
I mounted an old NEC 4x Narrow SCSI on the underside of the dash of a Mercury Sable a couple of years ago 'cause the price was about 360 for the GM changer. This reader has full FF/RW/Play/Eject control on the face plate. It skips way too much (gotta be on fresh asphalt without many cracks or stationary).
If one wanted to, one could hook it up to an SCSI-bus equipped computer under the front seat - this would be well within the 6 feet you get under the narrow SCSI spec.
It is kinda nice that this old player uses caddies instead of a tray. I have plenty of those tihngs and they keep cd's from getting scratched in the car when you fumble in the glove box.
- Matt
Had a thought the other day - Why not get a cheap MP3 player that takes CF cards, and attach an IDE HDD to it instead. Since CF cards look like ATA devices, there shouldn't be any major modifications necessary, should there? Since there are CF-to-IDE converters why not the other way around? ANyone got any clues?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Yet another site has been struck down by the Slashdot DoS effect. Authorities are scrabling to figure out how to stop it. This year alone, over 20 sites have been taken out this year alone.
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microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
If its code-heavy get screen captures and make big ass jpegs. Put them on a public server someplace. Not exactly the real thing, but for most people it'll do just fine.
...that if this recycled gadget happens to use anything more than the barebones chassis, motor, spindle and laser of the CD-ROM unit (ie the electronics, which I can't find out as the site is badly slashdotted) then should SunComm's copy protection scheme be widely adopted, none of the discs will be playable in this player, nor will you get the option of downloading "secure" MP3/WMA files of them as you supposedly will if you play the protected disc in a netified PC.
Perhaps this is a good thing. A few thousand angry customers who can't play their discs in their car player demanding their money back will be a good shot in the arm for fair use. The European copy-protection scheme along the same lines only failed in 3% of CD players, but this was enough that it was immediately withdrawn and shelved.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
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Are cows the ultimate host, since we actually breed them? or are they just an ally? (hey, we guarantee you will survive as a species, but we get to eat you...)
and where are the virii farms?
bah!
Not that AMD shareholders like dealing with facts, but the P4 puts out about 25% less heat than Athlon. Even the Palamino with its much hyped power/heat reduction still puts out more heat than the P4 (or PIII).
Well, you wouldn't know if you read that article, since it was false. Thermal throttling has never even been observed on any P4 system in the field; I have never gotten my P4 system above 39 degrees, while the throttling point is 75. Besides, you can turn the feature off using IA32_CS_MISC_ENABLES (this is documented in volume 3 of the Pentium 4 manual). Of course, I'm certain that you didn't even bother to check, and are more confortable showing your ignorance on Slashdot.
I just came back from a camping trip where I brought my old Thinkpad 760XL with me as an mp3 player. Here's the breakdown:
-- Laptop (64MB RAM, 2GB HD, 24x CD) with Red Hat 6.1, xmms, gnome cd player (ebay price ~$150-$200)
-- 1 power inverter ($50)
-- 1 lime green power strip from Wally World ($2.00)
-- 1 pair standup speakers ($20)
Insert power inverter into stereo cavity. Plug in power strip. Place speakers behind truck seat on each side, routing wires through middle of seat armrest hole. Plug speakers into laptop, laptop adn speakers into power strip. Boot jukebox and enjoy.
Caveats: My truck (92 Isuzu) just happens to perfectly fit a flattened (opened all the way) laptop under the seat without the keys being touched. Your vehicle probably can't do this.
Power inverters do not like to be on when the car is started. So you'll have to switch the inverter off for a second, start the car, adn switch the inverter back on.
Don't forget to run the vehicle every hour or so if your parked and listening...or you'll find yourself with no battery power
This setup worked pretty well, you can reach down and use the keys to switch tracks, etc. You don't neccesarily want to be scrolling through a menu while driving 70, though. I had a very few problems with skipping, even on rocky mountain roads. Have fun!
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
Some of my friends used to use old toshiba double spin caddy drives because they had a test jumper on the back that makes them play audio cd's when you insert them. The eject button when pressed once would skip to the next track but if you held it down for a few seconds it would eject the cd. It was pretty cool. Anyway I just wanted to post that old scsi drives don't need a play button if they have a test jumper on the back.
This brings up a dam good question. Where could one find a programable remote control? For example, something that would plug into the serial port and you could send basic commands via remote though your back seat to the laptop stored in your trunk? Now listen you could do some pretty dam cool things with something like this, provided it had some type of customizable interface like a C API or Perl Module
#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Remote;
my $interface = Remote->new();
while(my $command = $interface->param("input");) {
if ($command eq "button1") {
$interface->play_really_loud("*NIN*");
}
}
Also anyone know where I could find one of those sexy little LCD displays? I know they are around, but forgot where. Something that has an open interface.
I got 2 used laptop from work and they would be prefect for this sort of thing.
Hrm wonder if I could get some type of GPS module for this type of thing... and map software... on linux or BSD.. Hrm
Fuck it, I am going for it... I am building a bat mobile. Something that would make James Bond cream in his shorts.
yea.
and then I am going to slap a big fat fucking "POWERED BY GEEK (and gasloine)" sticker on it and mount a quick cam on the dash.
This would make a great ride to get to work in.... I only live 2 miles for work... I think I need to move farther away like Canada or Sweden... better yet, the fucking moon... I dig man.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Now if someone would find something cool to do with other old stuff, like this crate full of 8086's (and other assorted computer shit) I have lying around. The only reason I keep them around is because whenever I'm about to throw them out I think that they might be valuable antiques one day, or that as soon as they're gone I'll think of some ingenius project to do with them.
:)
At one time I had dreams of using them to control robots or control this remote sensing apparatus I had halfway designed before forgetting about it.
I love to see old stuff resurrected again to do something really cool.
-Markus
P.S. Does anyone have any ideas for those 8086's?
"That explains the milk in the coconuts."
Can't you just use the cable that is supposed to go to your sound card instead of the headphone jack? Its probably line level and perfect for your amp.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Calm down, take the 2-foot steel rod out of your ass, and try to appreciate THE JOKE!!!
It's even got the fans pre-installed, all you need to do is aim it in the right direction!
Black paint.
HTH,
/Brian
It's a waste of time. Really. I've had one die on me (damaged cupholder track, nothing real interesting) and it's just not worth trying to find spare parts for something you can replace for $40. BTW, there's an interesting choice of terminology (squanderer = heat sink? Como se dice "heat sink" en espan~ol?) in there... actually a pretty cool word for it, though. /Brian
I knew this had to be *possible*; I never knew anyone had tried it, though...
:-)
Unfortunately you can't just wire up a CD-ROM to a CD-RW without that pesky motherboard getting in the way
/Brian
Silly me, responding to my own post, but...
It occurs to me -- they do have those low-profile (NLX?) cases out there; I'm typing on a computer that uses one right now. Get one of those, spray-paint it black, and you can fit it into your entertainment system. Alternately, just cram it into a plain old external slimline case and plug it in...
/Brian
Not really -- "squander" means to waste something (usually money) in English, but "disipador" is directly cognate to "dissipate" which is what a heat sink does in English.
:-) )
But you may have come up with one of the cooler mistranslations I've ever seen; I like the idea of hooking up a "heat squanderer" to my hardware. It's quite poetic. (Besides, it's not like you can do anything useful with the excess heat anyway
/Brian
[reasons why not to keep a /. mirror of sites]
c) Its not the freshest information, the author could decide to revise the information. But the mirror might not reflect that.
I know! We could always get the mirror site to update itself on a relatively speedy basis - say, a couple of hundred times a second or so - and then we could be sure the site was up to date! And since all the Slashdot users wouldn't be hitting the original site a couple of hundred times a sec...
Um. Never mind.
What, you expected a serious response?
OK. As above, but with a slightly more sane update period. RAruler's other points are certainly pertinent and important to address - legality is an issue that won't go away, and deciding the optimal level of information to mirror is not one that can be automated easily, especially in terms of dynamic content (how many sites out there actually use a lot of the metadata initiatives around?). Still, a little care could go a long way towards making sure that some of the neat and nifty people that Slashdot tells us about every day don't get crushed under the pressure of their 15 minutes of fame.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Save the poor slashdotted site two page fetches :-p
Computer Audio CD Car Player HOWTO
Oh, wait a minute...
Might be an idea to give the smaller sites a bit of warning before thrashing their servers into oblivion.
Nope, they can't. The FAQ explains why, and it's sort of too bad, but ... they can't. It comes up once in a while, would be cool. Oh well.
simon
"Hey Carlito, r'membah me? Benny Blanco from the Bronx!"
It's simple enough to buy one of the many MP3 players on the market that reads CDR/CDRWs... Hell, after looking at the cost of competing media, they're virtually free. +)
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
now think about drive your car with your genius netmouse (scroll buttons for gear changes) or your usb force feedback joystick...
DON'T PANIC.
why bother when google.com probably has it cached anyway.. 90% of sites i've not been able to access are cached at google.
I know it does more than 128, I believe I have some 192s it plays fine. I don't have any VBR, but IIRC a review (mp3.com or highwaymp3.com) mentioned that it plays it, but that the time counter is off (big whoop, IMHO)
Of course, you could always hop over to a circuit city and check. I'm rather certain that the one I have is not the original 1.0, since certain things in the manual are different.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
If you're at all interested, let me give a no-holds-barred thumbs up.
One caveat. I went in expecting to pay a decent amount less than I did. 340$ for the player. $40 for Circuit City's 2-year warranty. 30$ to install (and that's with the free installation!). $450 total. And worth every penny.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
cached at google? so how do i get to it then?
It would be possible to use a microcontroller to send the play command to the IDE port, i'm just not sure how much of the bus you'd have to implement or how expensive it would end up being.
well, you can do it with a cheap 8051 microcontroller.
Take a look at Using an IDE Hard Drive with a 8051 Board and 82C55 Chip article at Paul's 8051 Code Library.
There is also a High Capacity MP3 player
I know you are kidding, but considering the fact that installing MS-OSes is not always easy (think NT4) HOW-TO's on that subject might even be very useful. Now the installation works quite well most of the time, but optimizing it, and tweaking it to your needs helps. Correct partitioning (yes, even that is *very* usefull on a WinOS machine! Especially if you want to keep your data safe), ect. ;-) On the other hand, nobody who would *need* this stuff would ever think of searching and reading such a HOW-TO...
Explaining to joe-normal-user that all those icons in the icon tray *eat* memory and that if you don't need them you can kill them (Run/Services in registry), explanations of how to keep your start menu clean and small (removing README, docs, helpfiles which you can access from the program itself).
Well now that I think of it, I should get started
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Heres another example of reusing youre CDROM
Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
In this line of work there's also a dutch version.
Isn't it wierd how as soon as a good article pops up the links are instantly Slashdotted (and remain so for several hours)? Now I like Slashdot and all (I read it daily), but it's almost as if we (the devoted readers of Slashdot) are a swarm of locusts, feeding on the web site provider's bandwidth and server resources, suddenly attacking a server farm almost all at once, then we disappear almost as suddenly as we came, leaving a trail of overheated processors and worn out disk drives in our wake, often times confusing administrators and leaving them lost in a daze...
--guru
I was actualy thinking about doing something like the for my mom's car for mother's day, but decided aginst her car is so lousy. It strikes me as a inexpensive, but effective method to play cd's in your car. I'd estimate that all the parts do do a decent job of this woulf be under $30 US, as opposed to a retail kit for $100-200 USD.
$1200 for a ten gig hard drive? Damn, that's quite expensive. /.
That Aiwa looks nice though for a few hundred. I say the retail channel with the best price point for car audio is car parts stores, but I haven't noticed much in my neighborhood yet. I hate to buy stuff that just gets ripped off, but if it gets around a hundred bucks and some change, I'd probably buy an MP3CDplayer. I've been waiting for that. Probably gettin' quite close at this point. With a removable faceplate would be very nice.
As far as saving old CDs, just take out the laser assembly and the little DC motors and all you've got left is some plastic sheet metal and a bit of circuit board, you don't need to be treasuring that stuff.
Sam's Laser FAQ has all kinds of interesting ideas including pumpin fiber with them and doing networking with dishes sorta like the O'Reilly microwave dish networking article a few days back on
Anybody else out there doing telecoms with second-hand CD laser assemblies? I've got some questions about antennae dimensions.
ArciheBunker, yeah I want to, but I'll have to build a pre-amp, which I've been too lazy to do :)
That would correct all problems, and would make things real good, because I could include a high-pass crossover for the front speakers (and just use the on-board low-pass x-over in the amp for the sub), and all would be at matched impedence. The sound quality would be a lot better, and it would increase the life of the cd-rom headphone amp :)
But the reason why I need a pre-amp is that it's nowhere near loud enough for the amp.
I think hack jobs look the coolest. Ones that you do yourself, and people marvel at it and then ask you questions about it. People dont do that with expensive car stereos or cd players.
Here's what I made a few months ago, using my CD-ROM drive, and a handful of components. It's simple, and works really well, and doesn't need any computer PSU's or Inverters or anything like that, since cars supply ~+13v anyway. The only trouble I've had is with the crossovers, but I'm going to build an active high-pass filter for the front speakers, instead of passive.
same thing I am doing, I have a p75 I am setting up in my trunk, with a 4x40 lcd in the Dash, it should look pretty nice when I'm finished
I've seen someone mention the problem of skipping when going over bumps. One could easily just switch to a CD Player that already has skip protection (through a read ahead device). However, there has to be a way to stop this.
I've seen someone mention putting it in foam or something like that... That might work, but wouldn't it still bounce a little? If the foam is even relatively stiff the player will just bounce with the car.
What about using the foam in one of these pillows to cushion it. Also, put it in a case attached to two wires so it can swing back and forth when the car hits a bump... I saw cup holders like this once. The drink wouldn't spill because they swung back and forth and stayed level... at least most of the time.
Hopefully those measures would stop most skipping.
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No sig for you.
Shock is definately a concern, but nothing a little creative mounting wouldn't overcome.
Personally, however, I still like hooking up my MP3 player to the system instead... no shock concerns, easy to mix and match tunes, etc. If it wasn't for the sticker-shock on Flash cards, it'd be ideal.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The 7805 is a passive regulator. That means if your CD player needs like 1A, 5V, your 7805 will dissipate 1A * (12-5)V = 7 W. That is a *lot* of heat, (the case is 50/W junction/ambient). Then take into consideration that cars are not too cold anyway and might want to consider active voltage regulation.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
While this is a cool little hack, but if you are interested in going all the way to frankenstein mp3 decoding car audio system glory check out www.mp3car.com
hey I was just letting of some steam. I agree it should be a minus 1... its not my fault the moderators are who they are today.
since its obvious little sites like this are going to slashdotted as soon as they are posted couldn't /. create its own mirror since we know /. can handle the load and the site probably isn't very big. Plus it would only have to be for a couple hours.
Now all I need is an old unused CD player. Geezh, were can I order one ?
Nobox: Only simple products.
First, most all CD-ROM drives after 4x don't have a play button and won't automatically start playback when an audio CD is inserted.
So this means you're going to need someway to send the IDE signal, which would probably involve, at least, a microcontroller although I'm not fully aware of the ATAPI spec and you may have to make the device completly physical (e.g. go through all the init routines) to even get to the point where you can send a command.
Second, these drives, as mentioned don't have skip protection. Todays in dash CD players have read ahead of 45-60 seconds or more, because this is what it takes to get even marginal performance while driving over gravel in your SUV.
Personally, I built an in-dash MP3/CD player using an old Sony VAIO 233 MHz system for my friend. The CD-ROM which came with the system was used, and in this case it already had mechanical skip protection. I used the LCD that came with it and bought a digital touch screen kit and connected this up the parallel port. To completly prevent skipping, I extracted the selected CD track to memory as it loads, at about +120 sec into playing buffer. Works very well. This was in a Jeep and he's told me he hasn't got it to skip. And yes, it runs Linux off an ATAFlash IDE card (no noise!).
In reference to the original post, you don't have to be a N.A.S.A. engineer, all you need is a laptop and some time (a few weekends).
By the time you're finished looking for your obstruficated CD-ROM and forcing the thing in your dash, you'd might as well been better purchasing a $165 car player as you'd be adding no addition functionality.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Anyway, your point is a valid one, so if I decide I'm going to try running sensitive electronic equipment off the wiring in my car (not likely, since I don't drive), I'll remember that those lines aren't the cleanest.
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This is something that is painfully obvious, although few, if any have actually done it before. With the right phrasing, you just might be able to pull off a patent on the idea.
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This is another mirror only for this article. We have really been slashdoted !!! http://johncglass.com/mirror/cdplayer/
I'm sorry for my bad english (I'm spanish), but i looked "disipador" on the dictionary and found that funny word "squanderer". Yes, I mean a Heat sink. But then I can't remember that word. Isn't it a sinonym?
I'm sorry, our server could not afford such traffic, here it's link to a little mirror for this articlet erAudioCDCarPlayer/
http://www.terra.es/personal/sorgocondenado/Compu
Is there a way to use my old 1X DVDROM to watch a movie on a TV.
I have built an MP3 player using an old CD-ROM, the board required comes from here, http://www.bettanet.net.au/gtd/ relatively easy and cheap. Can be run off a computer PSU or a single 12Volt power source.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
You missed the line that said that the MP3 player user a PSU OR single 12 volt supply.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
And that's constructive in what way, exactly? We've already covered the shock aspect, and we've seen people using these things FOR YEARS without problems, so go be an ass somewhere else.
The sound quality would be absolutely terrible, to start. Computer audio components generally get brutally low signal to noise ratios.
there was an elektor project a. 8-9 months ago about converting a CDROM drive into a standalone MP3 player
A P4 with the proper case might just be an excellent anchor!
Come to think of it, this covers ALL Intel machines, as well as Cyrix and some AMD!
Wow... will the multitudes of uses for computer equipment ever cease?
It's just another step beyond my mp3 player in my car
(I've been using an old CD-ROM in my car for ages, here's my experience)
Mine has been happily working for about 2 years like this, and with some rags at the sides as padding it's better over the bumps than my friend's cheap car stereo.!
IDEA: (for the enthusiastic, probably even a money-making idea): It would be possible to use a microcontroller to send the play command to the IDE port, i'm just not sure how much of the bus you'd have to implement or how expensive it would end up being.
Good luck! (but be careful...that site describes what can happen)
I've been collecting these drives for years. I managed pretty much the controller. Did not decide on Linux supporting chip yet. I thought of building little-to-medium smart racing cars with them, 4-drives per car. I want to Organize an after school group of kinds together with my son. Any one with Mechanical engineering skills that is willing to post suggestions? Boaz@ElectroZaur.Com