Hi everybody

First of all, I don't have much idea about hardware and english ;-) Sorry if it sounds funny to you, but I'm only speculating...
Has anyone thought about the possibility of attaching a notebook CDROM to the free IDE cable of a Riocar?
It sounds easy, but it would need to play CD's and / or MP3... even record or compress music direct to HDD?
Maybe it involves a cmpletly new player...

Cheers:

Miguel.

Don't see any particular problems apart from how to mount it.
Patrick or Hugo should know about any hardware limitations.

You will need to write your own software to control it however as there is no built in support for a CDROM. Probably will need a new kernel as well which has CDROM support turned on.

You could connect the analog out of the CDROM drive to the aux in on the empeg and then you'd just need something to send the correct play/stop commands to the CDROM drive.

- Trevor

It should work. The Rio Central is very similar hardware-wise to the Rio Car. The power draw should be ok, the main problem is the funny little connectors used by most laptop CD-ROMs!

Hugo

In reply to:

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You could connect the analog out of the CDROM drive to the aux in on the empeg and then you'd just need something to send the correct play/stop commands to the CDROM drive.

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Actually, you shouldn't even have to worry too much about the play/stop/pause command thing too much. All (if not, then 99.9%) of CD-ROMs out today support MMC command-sets, at least for the basic commands. (Play, Stop, Pause, Next, Prev..) While I haven't looked, I'm sure there's a tiny command-line utility (maybe even linkable functions) that will send these commands to the drive.

The hardest part would be writing the interface module, to watch for incoming commands from the remote/front panel, translate them into commands to the CD Player if necessary, otherwise letting them thru to the player itself. (Volumne, etc..)

Me.

Yeah. I meant that doing the UI is the hard part. There are loads of little command line apps that send the commands.

- Trevor

Getting the adapter from the slimline CDROM plug to a normal IDE socket shouldn't be that hard since some people use slimline drives in small form factor cases so they must exist somewhere... (Famous last words)

- Trevor

Baber.com and CableClub.com have them. I've purchased one from Baber.com before (call...don't bother with the online ordering) and it worked well. I used it with a panasonic SR-8185-C like this one

In reply to:

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Yeah. I meant that doing the UI is the hard part. There are loads of little command line apps that send the commands.

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Aah, sorry. My brain was still at the beginning: "How do I get this to work in my Mini, and without compromising portability?" mode.

Me.

Hi

So I'm still confused...
My 'ideal' idea is something like that:
I have a free IDE connector on my empeg, and i think it would be quite easy to connect it to a laptop IDE CDROM, which i guess it has the same connector.
Now, the player would have another source selection wich would say 'CD', to read CD music or CD data (MP3), or even saving it to the HDD, controlling it as a standard Linux CD drive. I guess there are some CDROM drivers for Debian... CD music would be pre-saved in RAM to avoid craps, so player would have to read data through IDE channel instead of analog music through aux ins. I've seen some Linux CD programs to play music from a CDROM, would them be compatible?
I've seen some laptop CDROM drives, very compact and nice to install on my car dash. With that and the tuner kit I'd be able to forget my Pioneer...
Well I'm not such a Linux programmer, so I'm sorry if it sounds crazy...

Cheers:

Miguel

Laptop CDROM drives don't have the same connector as a laptop hard disk. The interface itself is the same but the plug/socket isn't.

You could cache the audio from the CDROM if you do DAE but since the audio on the CDROM is uncompressed, the amount of antiskip you could do wouldn't be that much. Probably around 30ish seconds depending on how much memory is available.

The hard part is how and where to mount the CDROM drive. If you're installing it internally then you'll need to find space for the drive inside the empeg casing and if you're mounting it externally then you'll need to work out a way of connecting it up reliablely and without blowing up the empeg.

If anybody wants to temporarily donate a laptop CDROM drive and an adapter which fits the IDE connector inside the empeg I'll write an app which binds into Hijack to control it

- Trevor

The only issue with these is that they convert to .1" pitch 40-way connectors (+4 way floppy drive style power)... not the 44-way 2mm pitch laptop drive style connector.

So, this helps a lot but doesn't get you the whole way!

Hugo

Exactly....on my last project, I used the adapter above with one of these cables, but cut off the power connector. On the other end you could put one of these gender changers if you want to plug into the existing cable.

For the power to the CD-ROM, I just cut off a laptop power connector from an old adapter and ran 5v straight from the system board.

Well I'm not such a Linux programmer, so I'm sorry if it sounds crazy...

It's not crazy. It's just that... even if you COULD get a docking connector for a CD-ROM drive working, it would still require programming to do all of the things you want to do (ripping the CD for example). So if you aren't a programmer, you would be going to a lot of effort to build something that didn't do anything.

There are two other non-empeg products on the market that will do ripping right in your dash. They are expensive and they do not have as much storage as the empeg, but they exist.

Mmm, I do hope that gender changer isn't just a straight through pin thing like it looks. This will swap all your pins, ie pin 1 will go to pin 2, 2 to 1, 3 to 4, 4 to 3, etc. Unless you use two of them between every device, you'll mirror all the signals from top to bottom.

Hugo