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Do It Yourself CD Changer
SuperDuG writes "This is a true homebrew solution to saving a few bucks when it comes to cd changers. And to make it even better the whole setup is controlled by none other than linux. Seems like a nice setup to do batch burns without user interaction. Source is provided if you wanted to build your own." Not sure if this is very practical, or even if it would be cheaper than buying a changer, but it sure looks cool.
/me bows down in awe and reverence
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
How long until the RIAA sends out a cease and desist for the publication of this "device to potentially increase the efficiancy of copryright-infringment?"
Not sure if this is very practical, or even if it would be cheaper than buying a changer, but it sure looks cool.
Nothing spells chick-magnet like a wooden contraption designed to require less movement.
Hank! White!
What kind of geek are you?
Geek code 101: You are supposed to make things like this out of Legos.
A five gigabyte photo collection?
Can we say: porn?
doesn't look like "a few bucks" cost for me to make it myself.
I rather recommend you Beowulf cluster of CD/DVD drives, daisy-chained with SCSI or IEEE 1394 or something, as usual.
Wouldn't a "do it yourself" CD changer be where you actually get up and change the CD yourself?
" If I wanted to, I could SSH log into it while at work, load a CD in the tray, burn it, and remove it all remotely. Of course, the CD would still be in my basement, so the exercise would be somewhat pointless!" :)
That's simple. Just build an add on that carries it up stairs, sticks it in an addressed envelope and drops it in the mail.
Be sure to check out the rest of his page. Fun stuff.
But still I would have preferred it in aliminium or likewise... But it's cool to see non-computer materials (wood etc) beeing used in a computer environment in that way.
;)).
(Back off all modders that built a wooden case
I went into this one expecting to find a pc emulating an automobile CD changer. This is an idea I've been wanting to try out for a while. I've shelved it for a while because I have too many things going on, and lack of knowledge on my part.
Does anyone anything about emulating a cd changer's controls so I might plug a computer into the back of a stock car stereo with changer support, and fake it into driving an ogg player?
From what I gather, each system's pinout is different, but generally they all have to work the same, right?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
at least he is honest. no need to justify a tinkering project under the guise that it is somehow useful. Tinker for tinker's sake I say!
Bah, I just use my kid brother. "Yo, urchin! Fetch the next batch of CD's will you? There's a nice shiny nickel in it for you and if they get burned before 5 o'clock, a chocolate bar!"
I'm working on training my dog next.
...what a CD changer would look like if it was built by the Amish.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I was looking at this guy's wooden assembly and all I could think was, why didn't he use an used dot matrix/ink printer for the carriage. That would certainly be pretty interesting to play with, and would definitly be more precise, ofcourse he'd still need the up and down movement done using another motor.
"Do-it-yourself cd changer" ? Isn't that the way a single disc cd player works already?
Whale
Check out the Rubiks cube solver made entirely out of Lego's.
http://jpbrown.i8.com/cubesolver.html
Even uses a cam to figure out what is on each of the cubes faces!
of the time when my friends dad couldn't afford a new Playstation 2 for Christmas. Christmas morning rolls around and my friend finds a Playstation 2 carved out of wood under the tree.....
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
Foolish humans, when will you learn.
Now if they were truely geeks, they would've made it out of a Lego Mindstorm kit.
_______
2B1ASK1
Isn't there some way to build this out of floppy disks?
We really need a cheap CD/DVD jukebox. I've seen them at Comdex etc for $25,000. The hell with that.
Someone get a carousel CD player at Target for $100 and wire it up to a computer. There's 70,200 megs nearline.
Anyone up for that?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Maybe the poster will be sued and have SCO lawyers sending nastigrams for protecting their IP rights since this is technically derivative work ... Sorry, couldn't resist. Way too much S.C.O. FUD in the news the last few days.
Building some sort of gadget that changes the CDs in my cd tray is something I have often thought about. Mostly in the context of ripping my CD collection or burning a backup of my 5 gig photo collection.
The mechanicals
My first thought was to come up with something extremely simple, with no electronics. Ideally, the motion of the cd tray would trip some sort of mechanism that would eject the CD from the tray and insert the next one. After months of thinking, I still hadn't thought of a mechanism that had a hope of actually working.
The next idea was to pick up the CD, but how to pick it up? Vacuum came to mind, but that would get complicated, vacuum pump, solenoid valves, and all. Finally I decided to just pick up the CD by the hole, with an expanding finger, shown at right. The finger's end consists of a cone that inserts in the CD hold up to the shoulder. The whole finger is cut in half, and pivoted. The pivot is just to the right of the blue rubber band. Its a nail, which rests in a grove in either half. The rubber band is the only thing holding it together. The solenoid on the right pulls the pieces together on the back, which spreads the front of the finger, and holds the CD by friction fit. The shape of the cone is a bit tricky. It has to be made in such a way that it will hold one CD securely, but never a second. I tweaked the shape of the cone a bit after taking this photo.
the next challenge was moving the head around. It has to go up and down, as well as side to side. Stepper motors come to mind, but they do require a fair bit of electronics to drive, with 4 separate coils that need to be switched. Plus they need very precise timing, and still need some sort of "home" switch. Thinking about this a bit, I realized that plain old DC motors with a few micro switches for sensing key positions would be sufficient. The horizontal travel only needs to stop in three positions. The vertical travel only needs to go all the way in either direction. By making down travel gravity based, I didn't have to worry about mashing the stack of CDs or the tray with excessive down travel.
I mounted the pickup mechanism on a block with a hole thru it. This slides along a shaft for vertical guidance. The wheel to its right winds the string to pull the CD pickup mechanism up. Gravity pulls it down. The pickup, pulley, and gear head motor (hidden) make up the carriage, which slides on a smooth metal rod from an old Selectric typewriter (one of the shafts to hold the pinch rollers. The vertical rod also came from that same typewriter. If you ever get a chance to disassemble a selectric, do it. Its a fascinating marvel of IBM engineering from the mechanical adding machine days.
The metal rod, being very smooth, bears the weight of the carriage without too much friction. The wooden rail along the top is mostly to keep the carriage from tipping either way, and to hold the limit switches.
The carriage is pulled back and forth by a string which is driven by the motor on the left. I hadn't installed the string when I took the photo. The string is wound twice around the drive pulley, which gives more than enough friction to drive the carriage. And even if it does slip a bit, its the switches that the carriage hits that determine when to stop.
The Electronics
I was fortunate enough to have a PCB with some solid state relays on it, of the type "ODC-5" from Potter & Brummfield. Solid state relays are essentially an electronic equivalent of a mechanical relay. However, solid state relays only take about 15 miliamperes at 3 volts to drive, and so can be driven directly from digital logic lines or the PC printer port. This saved me from having to wire up a transistor amplifier to drive the relay coils with, like I did in the past. I also had some input relays. I could have hooked the switches directly to the parallel port, but the isolating relays gave me some flexibility in terms of schematic, and are handy for protecting the printer port. Hard t
I was thinking of doing the same by making a MiniDisc megachanger. Instead, for now, I bought a Sony CD-Audio megachanger and it worked out of the box. I still intend to go back to that idea though.
One thing I wish would be done is better control of the Sony CD changer. There are S-link projects out there but all use the parallel port, and IMO, that's too hacktastic, I'd want to continue or build a serial port S-link controller. There is some _very_ slick control software that can even ID all the discs and tracks in the changer, and you select a track on a computer and the changer will play your music. Most people would do MP3 instead, but man-machine and electrical-mechanical interfacing is cool.
Unfortunately, there aren't any Sonys that can burn discs, at least none that I know, and none that I know that can be used as a CD-ROM changer, at least affordably, so this project still has some merit.
A friend of mine used to be in an unsigned Metal band. He told me that one of the most boring parts is copying CDs. Apparently commercial CD copy companies usually had a minimum order that was quite large, and always invented problems with whatever was sent to them, creating longer turn around and more hassle. The cost per CD was also quite high compared with burning their own on a CDR.
Instead, what he would do, is to setup his PC next to a sofa in front of the TV, and manually swap CDs, while watching TV. He said that if he managed 20 CDs per hour (on his 40x burner) he would be doing well, but tropically managed less than that.
It was of course, boring, and prone to error.
A contraption to automatically load, burn and unload CDs, like in the article, would have been much better. He could have loaded it up with 200 blanks, gone to bed and come back in the morning to find it jammed, but at least with ~100 CDs done :-)
Is the mother of invention. Gotta love it. :)
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
Just buy more hard drives. 70,000meg isn't actually that much anymore. RAID, remember?
..don't panic
"Not sure if this is very practical, or even if it would be cheaper than buying a changer, but it sure looks cool."
/.'s articles. :)
Ah, that statement could describe well over half of
However, I still need to write this guy and if he's going to tear it down, I want it.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
or does every Flintstones episode come to mind at this moment?
And I was just about to buy a couple of StorageTek L700s for my company... I'll get some wood instead, far less expensive....
Incidentally, there is this thing called tape which you can backup to...
I wonder how many devices this counts as, given the RIAA's suspect formula? If his CDRW writes at 24x, boy is he in the s**t ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Now that would be progress!
Anyway, when it comes to mechanical widgets in computer history, nothing comes close to the IBM "spacebar button" solution.
The story goes something like this: In the sixties, IBM was running two jobs at night, but between the jobs an operator had to press the spacebar. Apparently, changing the software was impossible due to lost source or something, so this guy came up with an ingenious solution. He mounted an iron arm to a clock with a Lego block on it which would fall down on the spacebar at a given time (don't remember how he did it in detail...)
Truly high-tech IBM stuff...
Now his "52" cd burners will be worth 104!
The previous sig has been removed due to
That reminds me...cool idea and all, but a little _too_ geeky even for me :) -- but since I've become a Mac head, got the iPod and got totally hooked on iTunes...
:)
I just don't use my 300+1 Pioneer CD changer anymore. A couple of weeks ago I added in the SliMP3 player (replacing the CD player altogether) and added 2x120G (RAID-1) drives to hold the library.
Anybody interested in a _real_ CD changer?
I mean, I've tried GIVING this thing away. My brother, best friend, parents, wife's parents -- nobody wants it. Unfortunately I've gotten them all hooked on Mac's and iTunes as well. My mistake I guess.
with random access to CDs? Preferably scalable to a few thousand disks?
I have to say brilliant hack! But eeerm... Did you guys check his source code ? There are *gulp* gotos in there! *grinding teeth*
Imaging a beowulf cluster of those!
There is this thing called tape... let's see (if the data is compressible) you'll get 70Gb on one DLT7000 cart.
That means that the 10slot one drive DLT7000 library that I pulled out of a skip can store 700Gb, so I can backup and (here is the cleaver bit...) take the backup round to my mate's house so when mine burns down/gets burgled I haven't lost my data... Woo Hoo...
Admittidely I do have to persuade the insurance company that I actually owned the library but there you have it...
(-1, Pythonic)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Compare the parent's moderation and this one's...
I am also sure Matthias doesn't have much pr0n on his machine : who'd backup pr0n when it can be found on that many places?
Now, these might definitely be family pics.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Oooh shiny!
Bitchslapped. Neat.
This is definitely cool. For all the people saying this type of hack is irrelevant because of the storage difference between HDs and CDs, I must say that's rather short-sited when you consider that the form factor for optical media is most likely going to stay the same all the way into the violet laser media. So, while you could call this an out-of-date CD changer, you could also call it a cutting edge Blu-Ray changer. And commercial alternatives are insanely overpriced.
But this is certainly not the last word on the matter. I've got my own plans as well. One thing we didn't see was any kind of performance specs about how big of an unattended stack the thing could handle. I read the part where he said it was just for fun, but I'd still like to know how many he could do consecutively.
The option I'm considering is where you take a plastic housed stack of a hundred hundred discs sitting on a conveyer whith a slot at the bottom of the stack only big enough for one disc at a time to be rolled out. I think some of the commercaial solutions might work like this.
He used spare CD-ROM motors to fully automate it. Not as classy as this one (it throws the completed CDs onto a chair), but works just as well...and he even wrote queuing software for it. I have a videoclip of it somewhere...
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
If you don't value your time, or care if it works reliably.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
They probably don't teach that particular bit of doggerel any more...
Its supports CD,CD-R,CD-RW,DVD,DVD-RW,DVD-R and what not!, just out of the box!.
That thing is the type of stuff that us art-technology people like. It looks elegant, and it can be seen in a context apart from the fact that it burns CD's... it is creating copies, which could be seen as cloning one's self. If only he had thought of that at the time, it would've been a great work of art!
stuff |
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
And to make it even better the whole setup is controlled by none other than linux.
As a Windows user (yes, there are still a few of us around) I don't find that better.
In any case, he's obviously a hardware guy and not a software guy. The program has to run as root, it's controlled through the printer port, and he is puzzled how to make it work through the printer port using Windows. It would have been cooler had he used something like TINI to allow control through a network. "TINI's networking capability extends the connectivity of any attached device by allowing interaction with remote systems and users through standard network applications such as Web browsers."
Notice the buckling spring keybaord in the last photo? Booyah.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
I remembered seeing this site featured on slashdot last year. It looks like Mattias Wandel is quite the innovator. Check out the rest of his site for all kinds of interesting inventions.
Diskmakers has a similar gizmo in their catalog that is used for burning CD-R's. It picks up blank cd from an input stack, drops it into the open tray of the drive, then picks up the burned cd and drops it into the dot matrix printer to print the label on the disk (printable cd's) then picks the disk up out of the printer and drops it onto the output stack. Of course their gizmo isn't made of Wood. (http://www.discmakers.com/hardware/)
or burning a backup of my 5 gig photo collection
That means pr0n, right?
This just looks like a homebrew of a mass duplication device manufactured by Cedar Technologies (http://www.datasure.com/cdrpubl.html)
I submitted this a couple of weeks ago, gotta love how the system works. :(
The idea of this changer is pretty cool, though. Simple yet elegant. I wonder how bored he was when he started tinkering?
Wait a minute. I got it. You could play with your magic nose goblins.
If you want to do batch burns, get a Composer Max, the thing burns 400 CDs(and even DVDS) without user interaction!
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
This guy's page was mentioned last year.
Wood.
Must.... suppress.... Beavis... and
Immature as hell, but those guys still crack me up.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It would be more in keeping with the wooden construction, methinks...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
5 Gigs of Porn? This guy sure is a pervert!
My hypothesis on how to deal with lining up an mp3 collection to work as a cd changer was to consider each subdirectory equivalent to one cd. Then you could use Artist - Album subdirs to divide the collection up.
Or perhaps some code which digs in each Artist subdir and collects all of the album subdirs? I never got that far. Still looking for pinout info and time.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I have a do-it-yourself CD changer. It's called my hand. :)
My blog
Should read: Mostly in the context of ripping my CD collection or burning a backup of my 5 gig porn collection.
I have a feeling this dude will need it, since he sounds like a career masturbater to me.
...he is also a very talented and prolific one:
1. Rather than buy a printer for his C64 back in the day, he elected to build a home made plotter and make several improvements along the way. It's quite impressive!
2. Before digital imaging was even remotely on the minds of personal computer users, he constructed a slow but functional low-res scanner That has to be a hallmark of a true hacker--his creations may not be practical and are of limited use, but they are fascinating and forward thinking.
3. Sometimes hacks really do save money, like this multi-megapixel digital camera made from a cheap $100 scanner at a time when most decent digital cameras cost 10 times that much. Sure, it took 30 seconds to take a pic, but it served the purpose for non-action photography and when motion was involved it could produce some interesting effects.
(bows down) I'm not worthy....
I actually found this solution for a virtual CD-ROM jukebox on http://www.linuxjournal.com
It worked for me in a test environment. I was serving up CD images faster than Hot Grits!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
nearline crap
:o)
i think the the term is 'offline' crap...
a floppy, or cd would be offline, but a hard drive would be 'online'.
...when you stated you really wanted "affordable tape backup for long term storage". A recordable CD jukebox (or perhaps even better to use DVDs) could be an inexpensive alternative to those $1000+ tapes. The media is also more available, less expensive and arguably more durable than tape. The one drawback would be the large number of disks would make the setup bulkier...
Software could easily be developed to span the drive image over even dozens of CDRW disks--the final one being the index. When you need to recover data it could totaly leave tape in the dust--one of the CDs would be an index CD, which the software would load to determine what data CD your file was on--then it would zap to that CD and grab the file. The whole operation would take less than a minute.
My personal experience with selectively restoring lost data is that the linear nature of tape makes the searching for the data tedious and time consuming (perhaps there are faster tape solutions out there but I'm sure they are expensive). Incremental backups might be trickier to fully automate but still quite possible.
I know I saw this before at least a year ago. I thought it was from here.
Well, at least now I know I'm not the only geek who reads Sublime Times at Sublime Directory.com.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
... he said at the end that "CDs are still cheaper per megabyte than DVDs" *sigh*
"A Bioorganic CD Changer, constructed by stretching tissue across a calcified skeletal structure featuring four digits and one additional opposing digit."
;-)
They're filing it with a patent for the idea Bill described in his last book; the infamous "factoring of large primes algorithm."
Microsoft: Marketing is Everything. And we mean, *Everything!*
it's the same guy of fuckingmachines?
Check out the rest of his site and his brother Markus' site. My hat is off to both of them. I wish I had lived next door to these guys when I was a kid.
I dont remember that Violet chick-- but I do recall those vile acts being...Behind Victory Garden Walls.
After a couple years as a professional digital photographer, I have about 200GB of original JPGs.