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Re: USB adapter
mojoehand wrote:
Adapters to connect a USB host (PC or other) to an IDE/ATA drive are
very common. Does anyone know of an adapter to connect to an IDE
controller (like a CFFA) and provide a USB host? What I'd like to do
with such an adapter is to plug in a standard USB-CF card reader
external to the Apple II.
The obvious solution would be to run the 40-pin ribbon cable from the
CFFA out to an IDE/CF adapter, as others have done. I don't want to
have a semi-permanent "thing" hanging off of the computer. Also,
making a removable connector (like a DB-25) for such a cable would
mean dropping most of the grounds from the 40-pin cable, which I don't
want to do.
FWIW, the many grounds are not there for current-carrying capacity,
but just for shielding, so you could easily connect all of them
together to one or a few grounds at the connector (on both sides
of the connector) and it should be fine.
Apple did the same thing when they used a DB-25 for SCSI.
A little (!) Dremel work and you could arrange to slide a CF card
into a slot (at a place of your choosing) on the Apple... ;-)
BTW, you won't find an IDE-to-USB adapter chip. Since the USB
protocols are much richer than the IDE protocols, and such an adapter
would be a complete computer, requiring a quite novel "IDE driver".
SD card adapters *are* available, and would also greatly reduce the
wire count (though a Dremeled slot would still be most attractive).
-michael
NadaNet 3.0 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
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