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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.
P.S. Does anyone have any ideas for those 8086's? :)
Paperweights.
- A.P.
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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?"
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.
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.
And if it isn't playing a CD, the cd tray can hold your mocha frappachino.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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."
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 $40. BTW, there's an interesting choice of terminology (squanderer = heat sink? Como se dice "heat sink" en espan~ol?) in there... actually a pretty cool word for it, though. /Brian
I knew this had to be *possible*; I never knew anyone had tried it, though...
:-)
Unfortunately you can't just wire up a CD-ROM to a CD-RW without that pesky motherboard getting in the way
/Brian
Silly me, responding to my own post, but...
It occurs to me -- they do have those low-profile (NLX?) cases out there; I'm typing on a computer that uses one right now. Get one of those, spray-paint it black, and you can fit it into your entertainment system. Alternately, just cram it into a plain old external slimline case and plug it in...
/Brian
Not really -- "squander" means to waste something (usually money) in English, but "disipador" is directly cognate to "dissipate" which is what a heat sink does in English.
:-) )
But you may have come up with one of the cooler mistranslations I've ever seen; I like the idea of hooking up a "heat squanderer" to my hardware. It's quite poetic. (Besides, it's not like you can do anything useful with the excess heat anyway
/Brian
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Oh, wait a minute...
Might be an idea to give the smaller sites a bit of warning before thrashing their servers into oblivion.
If you're at all interested, let me give a no-holds-barred thumbs up.
One caveat. I went in expecting to pay a decent amount less than I did. 340$ 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
Heres another example of reusing youre CDROM
Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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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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
there was an elektor project a. 8-9 months ago about converting a CDROM drive into a standalone MP3 player
(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)