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Mini Drives for Mini-CDs?
fist_187 asks: "i'm working on a semi-portable MP3 player project, and would like to include a CD-ROM drive in my setup, but a full size drive is a little bigger than I'd like. so, I thought about using a drive designed for mini-CDs...but I can't find any! I know that there are several MP3 portables that use mini-CDs, but does someone know where to find the drives themselves (preferably in a USB or IDE variety)? The only thing I've been able to find, after some searching, is the Imation RipGO!, but that's already a player... defeating the purpose of building from scratch in the first place. Does anyone have advice on where to look?"
Lemme see if I got this right.
You want to build a product from scratch. While looking for components, you found a inexpensive complete product that meets your needs, available off the shelf, that has too many features for too low of a price.
And the problem is...?
What's your damage, Heather?
Isn't the combined size of the molex connector and the ide connector larger than the size of a mini-cd? I doubt you'll find a drive meeting your requirements. The only way I could see this working would be one that used the floppy ide/power connectoions. Of course, creating a cd-rom drive that can only hold less information than it's competition (zip drive) probably wouldn't do very well. But, gook look in your quest.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
1. Buy said mini-CD player from Best Buy.
2. Disassemble; make note of component manufacturers and part numbers. Call said manufacturer(s) for sample(s).
3. Reassemble. Return unit to Best Buy for a refund.
Kid-proof tablet..
See subject line.
If you can't reduce the travel distance of the shuttle, why not just live with a slightly long shuttle and make a housing for the lazer in a Mini-CDR format?
The ______ Agenda
4. Break.
5. hop around and cuss.
-- Insert wisdom here:
I'm working on a human transporter capable of carrying 4-6 people and keep them protected from the weather, move them around at speeds up to 70mph. The design is centered around my hopes to use a internal combustion engine - it would use gasoline and have things that go up and down and make a spark and go 'vroom' when you stepped on a pedal inside the passenger compartment, but I can't find any! I know that there are several person 'porters that use engines, but does anybody know where to get engines directly? The only thing I have been able to find is cars by Ford, Chevy, VW, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, etc... but those engines are already in a person mover... defeating the purpose of building from scratch in the first place. Does anyone have advice on where to look?
:)
I am sure that with my new invention and some simple mass production techniques I will be able to sell these new people movers at a slight profit for less than $200,000 apiece.
(Ok Dean Kamen if you are reading this - we are laughing with you, not at you.
-:-
Honestly though, if you want to build it just to build it because that is what you want to do, just buy a single one one of the ones off the shelf by Imation, reverse engineer it via destructive analysis (take it apart), use the parts and ideas from that one that you like, like someone else mentioned track down the OEM part maker for the drive and look into a bulk purchase of that part, then re-evaluate the viability of the project. But if it is in your heart, build it - that is for sure, and we stand behind you on building your prototype 100%.
If you can't build it in mass quantity cheap enough to sell it at the price point of the Imation less 10% (because between now and then prices are coming down on hardware) then it isn't a viable commercial product. If you can build it for a third the cost of the Imation unit, go for it.
But follow your dreams. Old men laying in their death beds never look back and say 'damn I am glad I played it safe back when I was young.'
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I've filled out the full size bays in quite a number of machines I have, and most still have floppy size bays available. I could put a floppy or zip drive in there, but a floppy is way too tight to build the rescue disk system I need to have (because it has more software than can ever fit on a floppy ... it's about 32MB in size). I've tried Zip drives, but all three I've used turn out to be regularly unreliable (I can coax them to work, but this isn't the kind of thing I want to put in customer locations). Maybe it's the media, but either way, the Zip drive option isn't where I want to go.
A small mini-CD drive that fits in the floppy drive bay would be ideal. Such a product would also let us start downsizing computer cases in a lot of new ways for the special purposes that don't need large amounts of CD data (such as firewalls and specialized mini-servers).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Ok well clearly you're not an electronics engineer. If you were really assembling a unit as anything more than a hobby you would know that ANY OFF THE SHELF CD ROM DRIVE can be adapted to a mini player. There are hundreds of small-board size cd players (look at all the walkmans) you just simply change the arm length of the lazer assembly.
Simple shit.
Problem. a mini cd is 180megs and they're expensive 2-3x the cost of a normal cd-r... is size really that big a deal =P sony discmans have been extremely successful in their full size and totally support the mp3 format now.
Find another project.
The RipGO may have an internal ide interface that gets converted for use with USB. if so just customize the hell out of it, removing any unwanted buttons that would allow features like playing mp3s and maybe a specialized enclosure of some kind.
6. ????
7. Profit!!!
In the mid 80s I modified a 3.5 inch floppy drive to record analog signals in a spiral track. Didn't work too well.
So much for my dream of a 1986 floppy walkman.
If you plan on making a few thousand units you'll be able to work with the asian companies that make the mechanical portions of these drives that you can put in your product.
Other than that, no one is interested in making a mass produced version simply because it holds so little data. Perhaps if someone would finally come out with an 80mm DVD then the players for that (~1GB for dual layer) might be enough data to make it worthwhile.
At this point, I'd suggest you simply use a large 2.5" or 1.8" or compactflash hard drive.
No one wants to carry their music seperate from their players anymore anyway. It's cheaper to have them seperate now, and the user interface is a little easier since you don't have to spend so much time catagorizing your music and playlists, but this isn't the case for the IPOD, and future devices aren't likely to continue to do it this way.
-Adam
Give jwz credit for your sig.
I don't know what your project looks like, but perhaps you could take a slimline CD drive from a laptop and pull the parts out of it to build what you need. Of course you'd lose the tray load ability, but maybe that's ok. If you are concerned about interconnect, almost all of the newer drives use a standard connector, and it is actually not hard to find an adapter to standard PC power and IDE.
Yes, but you only regret for the short period of time between realizing that you've just killed yourself and actually dying. A short, sharp shock, so to speak.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I believe all CF implementations are at least 10,000 to 100,000 write cycles minimum. (I'm 99% positive it's at the 100,000+ range at this point.)
I don't know of any flash memories limited to 1,000 write cycles at this point except for the program flash of Atmel AVR processors, but the only time such a unit should ever exceed (or even come close to) 1,000 flashes is during the software development cycle. (I think the average life of an AVR in Cornell's EE 476 lab is 2-4 weeks, due to the fact that it gets flashed every 2-3 minutes or more for 4-5 hours/day. In a production system the program flash should never need to be altered and in fact CAN'T be altered without external programming hardware in most AVR models.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I have run two IDE disk drives (210mb and 13gigs) in my car every day for the last two years and they are absolutely fine. Even driving over the cobbles at the university.
:-)
Just make sure you spin the disks down. I have the expendable 210mb with Linux and custom GPS/Ogg/mp3 software on it and the big music disk is only spun up when necessary.
If you really want a CDROM, there is a chap on the net who tried using a thirty foot cable to the boot: and it worked. Shove a standard CDROM under the seat.
Just don't try it with a 15K rpm disk
http://blog.grcm.net/
There are two good reasons to have music separate from the player.
First, you can conveniently trade music away from your computer. I have an iPod. (I love it.) I can't trade music from my iPod to a friend's iPod without going through a laptop or desktop computer. You can argue this is a software issue Apple could fix with a firmware change, but the little lcd screen really isn't a good way to do selection for "send this but not this". That's probably part of why you can't delete songs on the iPod unless you hook it up to a computer. (Though I'd really like to be able to do that too.)
Second, you don't use any battery power by handing your friend a cd or mini-cd. This is a wonderful thing for a device with no swappable battery. These things live and die by battery usage.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Get hold of sony's parts dept and obtain a vaio mini-disc data drive :)
That way, you can store data, import mini-discs and anything else you want. Mini-discs are small enough for what you are seeking.
It sounds to me you just have bad hardware, whatever hardware you have.
Remember when everyone and their dog was building their own MP3 portable? I was still in college.
It's time to move on and find something else to build from scratch. Nobody's gonna be impressed by a bunch of machinery and duct tape that doesn't quite fit in your pocket and only holds about 8 hours worth of music. And it's gonna end up costing you a lot of money and (more importantly) time.
- A.P.
"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?"
The Imation RipGo is available here for $100:
http://www.ssdonline.com/detail_page.cfm?Product ID=41608&affid=h57