Yesterday I was near a cash converters. I looked for old cd rom drives, and I found one for ten dollars (not the best price, but it was an rw with 42xr, 40xw and 12xrw...). I went to Jaycar to look for the right power connector, but it costs $7 for 2! That is too much for me. So I soldered straight to the dc power pins (there is heaps of room). The cd player works great. The idea is fantastic and very possible with relatively little money. Thanks for that one pocket!
The drive requires +5V and +12V. By chance, my regulated power supply has a variable voltage/current output and extra outputs for +5V and +12V. So in other words, no extra parts are really needed- the setup is almost free, apart from the 4 short wires (and the cd drive of course).
I did not get around to testing the amount of current that the drive draws, but it could be a problem running a whole array of cd rom drives in standalone mode from the regulated supply in this fashion. The 12V output gives up to 0.5A and thd +5V gives up to 3A. However, the variable supply can give up to 3A. So my next step is to buy and try a 7805 voltage regulator (costs $1.20 per cd drive, I suppose). Here I am at Marion, and that is what I am going to do next. Will update once I try it out and also measure how many amps it draws, so we can estimate how many we can run at once from the power source.
This will be good.
Some extra things to consider are:
- How many would we need in total?
- Where can we get them for dirt cheap?
- What kind of speaker systems would we want? I was thinking one mono speaker per drive, to keep down cost
- We could have interesting spacial elements in a setup also
- And the idea of a glitch track- I will speak about this more in my next post
0 comments:
Post a Comment