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The Guts Of An iPod
The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at
this Japanese web site
have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is
here. The FireWire contoller appears to be
TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B
w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."
The iPod copying limitations are not really restrictions, but rather just hiding the actual MP3 files. The MP3's can be accessed thru the command line in OS X or thru a number of graphical third party utilities, a process outlined in this Mac Observer article.
Some more interesting (?) discussion about the iPod's internals and copy protection is over at a similar article on MacSlash.
I'm getting an iPod myself, but not till January when hopefully they'll drop in price a bit when Apple announces their next line of products.
Apple's IPod Page for those unfamiliar. And here is the public specs and features page.
Karma-whoring since 1999.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I followed the link to Toshiba site. They will sell me the 5 GB little hard drive for $399 retail. Apple will sell me a complete iPod for $399.
:-)
If anyone wants the Toshiba drive, they should buy an iPod and rip it apart. This gives them the drive, PLUS you get a battery, various ICs, an LCD display, and some decent earbuds
Guess Apple's price for the iPod isn't really a rip off.
-- Olentangy
I'm *glad* Apple doesn't restrict itself to only in-house designs.
True, but it's a little weird to see that the OS for this device isn't actually Apple's, but a third party's. Seems like the only thing Apple really contributed to it was the design and, of course, the iTunes 2 integration.
But hey, it looks like a Mac product and works like a Mac product. Who really cares who actually designed the guts?
Now if only they'd open-source the OS so that we could build our own....
Here is a good article about the iPod on geek.com.
It's Lithium-Polymier (SP) battery, the cool thing about this kind of battery when you compare with other types out in the market is that you can shape it into ANY size so you you can make it really really thin. I don't think it offers better performance than lithium ion though. Following devices that I know of are using this type of battery iPAQ, m505, CLIE, HP's New PocketPC and probably other handheld devices.
kawai
You do know that this is an 80-133 Mhz Arm7 (80-110 for .18 micron, 100-133 for .13 micron) chip, and all current PocketPC (PocketPC2002) devices are based on a 206Mhz StrongArm with 32MB or 64MB of RAM, right?
The Intel product info says that 206Mhz StrongArm's are software compatible with Arm v4 processors (which the Arm7 is)
USB can put out 500mA to power a device. A microdrive draws 300mA during a constant read, and i believe peaks at 500mA during spinup. So it would be fine to power it off USB.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
That would be 240x320...
First, of course, you need mount the thing. The documented way to enable Firewire disk mode is through the configuration UI in iTunes, but this TIL article has instructions on how to set Firewire mode manually. Finally you'll need to get it to work with the Linux IEEE1394 drivers. Most Firewire hard drives are already supported, so it may work out of the box. Go to the Linux1394 pages for more information.
This is made by Cowon, which makes the Jet Audio.
a ud io/cw100s/img/cw100s_img.gif
128MB of RAM is just adequate.
http://www.cowon.com/product/d_audio/hardware/i
or.. how about imations' Rip!go drive?
It uses cheap 80mm CD. It can be used with Mac
and PC. Wouldn't it be better than the iPod?
FYI
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"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
Yes, many multi-level filesystems use them. Recently accessed files tend to live in RAM and a hard drive. Not so recently ones on a hard drive. Really not so recently used ones are off on mag tape (or WORM media) in a jukebox.
AFS also use to use local disk to cache files from the network, I think CODA can do the same.
Oh, and many web browsers cache files on local disk (or at least in the filesystem, which is normally local disk, but could be solid state, or across the network...). Netscape, and MSIE for example :-)
The "nasty" memory effect you are refering to, in a warm and fuzzy explanation, basically means that if the units battery is run down (but not drained) and recharged to full repeatedly, the unit will "forget" its zero point and you get less and less battery time (i.e. 100% becomes 80% of actual battery life).
Keeping the unit under consistant trickle charge (ie maintained at full) will aviod this until you use it. When in use, allow the battery to fully discharge before charging in order to maintain battery effeciency. It's annoying because I think that the all chargers should come with a "discharge" option.
Now all you have to do is mount the drive and copy the files using the expected directory layout
sorry but you will also have to update the database file in the ipod somehow so it knows the new mp3's are there I don't know what that invovles but it's a bit more then just copying the files over
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
I find ARM interesting. It is well on its way to be the worlds leading processor architecture. It is already used in 70-80% of mobile phones. Recently Microsoft stopped supporting Hitachi, MIPS chips for Pocket PC2002 and only supports ARM chips now. Palm already announced they would be using ARM in future.
ARM is an intellectual property company that licences it's processor architecture to semiconductor manufacturers. Intel pay an initial licence fee for the ARM architecture and pay royalties to ARM. Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments (for Digital Signal Processors) are unique in having architecture licences from ARM which allow them to add their own value through modifications to the basic ARM architecture, whilst other manufacturers can only produce the original ARM designs.
Intel originally purchased StrongARM from Digital, which had the first architecture licence from ARM, but Intel has been buying new architecture licences as well as normal licences from ARM. Intel's new ARM architecture is called Xscale which which will replace StrongARM.