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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?
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.
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
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.
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 :-)
"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?
It's a shame wood is an underestimated material. There is nothing as easy to handle as wood. Now, what would the added value of aluminium be? price? the need to buy new tools?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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!
(-1, Pythonic)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
the need to buy new tools?
It's not a need, but an excuse to set up a metal shop in the basement.
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.
They probably don't teach that particular bit of doggerel any more...
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.
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/)
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
...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....