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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.
You're right : he's a genuine hacker.
I am however much more impressed by his organ as he does not only need some manual skills but also a good ear to set it up.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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 :-)
Ype. That's something I plan to do when I get home. I reckon I can make it considerably more compact as well. I'm surprised he used a linear rather than rotational mechanism. Surely that makes it rather large.
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.
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!
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