iOpener

--- John Wilson <wilson(a)dbit.dbit.com> wrote: Good for you. I didn't want to pay the shipping and I can afford to wait a week or two. Way to go. There's great hack running around where you take a regular 44-pin cable that's long enough and attach a second connector immediately adjacent to the connector on one end. You use the inner pins of the end connector and the outer pins on the new connector to attach to the motherboard. ------------------- || |||| ^^ (use these "pins") drive end motherboard end Since one way to view the problem is that the motherboard connector is on the "wrong side" of the PCB (causing pin 1 to map to pin 2, etc), couldn't you do make a cable like this... || -------------------- || Wouldn't that simulate having a connector on the wrong side and reverse the effect of the motherboard wiring? AFAIK, there is no ready source of 12V. Also, consider the power draw. A laptop drive pulls 500-700mA (2,5-3.5W), a desktop drive draws closer to 9W-15W. It's even a consideration when choosing a different CPU (ISTR the WinChip180 is rated at ~9W, most Pentia suck around 13-17W). -ethan ObClassic: there's plenty of space on the flash disk to stick a small OS and a variety of apps including Kermit. If you hacked the flash and disabled the hard disk (or had a way to specify the boot order), you could bring it up by default into a terminal program and use it as a console if it weren't running some other app. Yes, a dumb terminal is cheaper and probably more VT100 compliant (double-high characters spring to mind immediately), but a real DEC terminal is not as portable. ===== Even though my old e-mail address is no longer going to vanish, please note my new public address: erd(a)iname.com The original webpage address is still going away. The permanent home is: http://penguincentral.com/ See http://ohio.voyager.net/ for details. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com