Phil online

I bought a slim-line slot-load DVDROM drive from this guy. I bought it sort of on a whim: I knew I needed one, I hadn’t gotten around to getting it yet, and a friend dropped by to ask about them. I said, “Oh sure you can get those. Here’s one for… um, $95 shipped, with the IDE adapter. I think I’ll buy it.” And I did.

It was shipped quickly, and it’s been sitting around for a month now waiting for me to have spare time to do something with it. The “something” I need to do is to build an enclosure for the drive so I can install it in my dash. The DIN slot below my radio is open. I plan to put the drive there in a way that looks “factory”. Wish me luck!

I was reading someone’s bondo-fabrication story yesterday, and it inspired me to start building the mount. I stopped at Home Depot on the way home and picked up some demel bits, a tub of bondo and some plywood. I took apart an old full-sized CD-ROM drive to use the metal case as a housing. But it turns out that I’m going to be gluing and bondoing so much stuff, I may just make the whole thing out of wood. Why not, huh? It will give me more placement flexibility.

I’ve got lots of room left over on the DIN slot; the face is 2×7.5 inches. After I put the slim-line DVD-ROM in place, I’ll have lots of room left for a powered USB 2.0 hub, some firewire plugs, and a power/reset switch (finally!).

I’ll post more later after it’s complete. For now, I’ll just mention that I did actually hook up the drive to the carputer last night, and it worked perfectly, first time. Yay!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 10:53 am and is filed under Carputer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.