iOpener

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Mon Mar 20 13:08:43 2000

On Mon, Mar 20, 2000 at 09:13:56AM -0800, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> 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

Cute! Well that sure beats slicing the cable up into 22 pairs and trying to
get them stay down in the "twisted" position while you put on a connector.

> ||
> --------------------
> ||
>
> Wouldn't that simulate having a connector on the wrong side and reverse
> the effect of the motherboard wiring?

Unfortunately not, IDC connectors don't work that way. You'll just tap the
same wires in different places, it's as if you took a regular cable and just
folded one end over, nothing has changed. I remember confusing the hell out
of myself with this the first time I tried to get a DZ11A cab kit working...
 
> 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).

Yeah actually I was wondering if the laptop drive is already pushing things.
The power supply is really tiny (integrated on the main board) and it's
powered by a puny wall wart transformer, the label says 81VA but even that's
hard to imagine given how light it is.

> ObClassic: there's plenty of space on the flash disk to stick a small OS
> and a variety of apps including Kermit.

I was thinking, making a PCMCIA flash card adapter for the 44-pin cable
wouldn't be hard at all, that might be another easy way to get stuff in
and out.

> 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.

Yeah I *wish* someone was making ASCII terminals like this box, it's perfect
for one, at least part time. But the box has too much potential to actually
*dedicate* your only one as being just a small/light VT100 replacement, which
is sort of a shame.

But I figure, even if the Netpliance folks close the loophole (which seems
inevitable given all the press it's gotten) and we can't buy these boxes for
$99.95 for much longer, the regular users will get tired of them eventually
and there will be piles of them on eBay in a year or two, probably for even
less than the $99.95. *That* will be the perfect time to put one on every
flat surface in the whole house! Meanwhile, gotta get an order out to Digikey.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Mon Mar 20 2000 - 13:08:43 GMT