Ratoc CFU1 USB Host

[papercrane]

I found a bettery which I think will work. Do you know a good place to look for a voltage regulator? If you don't, I'll just search myself.

[papercrane]

I found one.

[mspencer]

Digikey?  I don't know if they make off-the-shelf DC-to-DC regulators -- when I tried to go that route (when I assumed I would only ever need to power the Z itself) I had to get a breadboard and build the reference circuit from the documentation.

--Spence

[khafra]

I'm planning on stealing your idea there, Michael, except with a 3.5in HD (I wasn't thinking about the shock resistance, I hope it doesn't go kablooey).

How did changing to a 1mb filesystem affect your performance, though?  I could still change my partitioning or filesystems, and I'd like to know how it went.

Oh, and is the voltage regulator not built into the battery or the inverter?  That my scuttle my idea, as I have no equipment or knowledge for building electronics from scratch.

Oh, yeah--and is the disk access + slowdown while accessing fast enough to play video from?

[akpoff]

I built something like this back when I lugged a Tandy Model 100 around -- 4 d-cells in a plastic flashlight body that I had cut the lamp off of.  It worked very well and also propped the Model 100 up far enough to see the screen and type.

Have you considered carrying around an iPod or similar battery-powered, hard-drive-based mp3 player?  With my SL-6000 I recently took a 2.5" drive in an external enclosure and a power brick.  (I didn't have time to compile the .so module needed to access the iPod while on vacation last week so I took the 2.5" enclosure instead.)  It worked great other than needing to constantly be connected to a power source.

This week I hope to get the .so module compiled and try the iPod.  I'll still have to carry a powerbrick with me but only for recharging.  It would have been very nice to have access to my hard drive on the airplane.

--Aaron