connecting an ext. hard drive through CF-USB?

[bright_day]

Hello all,
Thank you to ashVID for working on creating a CF driverfor the NX-60. I want to connect a USB-powered external hard drive to the NX-60 and came across this device: http://shop.store.yahoo.com/firewireshop/newusb11hosa.html If this does what I think its can do, and the CF driver is compatible, then we can connect any USB external drive (and perhaps there's a similar firewire/USB 2 kind of set up somewhere.)

What do you guys think? Would this work?
-Shell

[bright_day]

OK, before you say - go search the lists - I did and saw that someone said that the Clie would be on the slave side of the USB. But then I don't understand what the difference is between the Clie and and iPaq which I've read can be connected to a drive. Any ideas?
-S

[rhart00]

From what I hear, the CF Driver being developer is for memory cards only. I can't go to in depth because I didn't really pay much attention, but I do remember reading that. Search the forums and you can probably find more info.

External HD would great!

[n2ifp]

Originally posted by bright_day
OK, before you say - go search the lists - I did and saw that someone said that the Clie would be on the slave side of the USB. But then I don't understand what the difference is between the Clie and and iPaq which I've read can be connected to a drive. Any ideas?
-S

The problem is your thinking technical. That's not the problem, the problem is Sony, hence the difference. If Sony doesn't share the API's or if someone can't reverse engineer it, forget it, sorry :(!

[OcellNuri]

The Clie cannot host a USB device, it can only act as a slave to another device (IE: Your computer).

Unless I missed something, I dont' think ashVID is developing the CF Driver.

[bright_day]

Isn't that interesting! Reading through that really long post about being beta-testers, it seemed like ashVID was the developer. My apologies to ayasin.

It seemed like the purpose of making a driver for the CF-slot is so that CF-enable devices could be connected and run. One of the obvious uses is using CF-card (which I'll be happy with). If the Clie has a less than obvious host-controller capability maybe someone will develop a device that will make the Clie master capable, inspite of the last of published information. Its the free-spirit of Ayasin and other developers to go beyond the borders set by Sony (and others) that make the Clie an even greater machine.
-Shell

[ashVID]

LOL, I am just a supporter!!! I may help help develop some emu's when I have more time and maybe even a new audio player but that will take A LOT of time...


ash =o)

[aardvarko]

that would require yet more drivers.

[vansouza]

It might be easier to do that via bluetooth... if such a thing can be termed easy at all...

[bright_day]

Heavy sigh, OK, Sony's not ready to really play with the big boys yet. I don't want to go to HP because I believe in the Palm OS. Thanks for all of your input.
-S

[Crash]

Originally posted by vansouza
It might be easier to do that via bluetooth... if such a thing can be termed easy at all... http://www.idg.net/ic_956458_5034_1-2788.html

[CliePet]

> The Clie cannot host a USB device, it can only act as a slave to another device (IE: Your computer).

Actually it can do both.

When connected to your PC for HotSync, the CLIE is the slave

If you hook up a printer to the NZ (and I suspect the NX as well), the CLIE will act as a USB host, to drive the printer.

The issue is lack of drivers. You would have to write a USB driver to talk to the device (like what you typically find on your PC)

The reason there is a lack of drivers is the lack of documentation (ie. there is a "UsbHostLib" library, but no documentation or interfaces).

It appears to be supported by the Sony Plug-and-play system (similar to the MS or CF slots)

[bright_day]

Closer and closer yet! This is exciting. I'm trying to marry both passions together - digital photography and pda technolust. I have an image tank with a 40gb drive but it has always felt weird to not be able to verify or even view my pictures after uploading them. The current crop of portable image viewers provide pathetically small LCDS; the new crop coming out very very soon have larger LCDs, but that is all they do - no PDA functions.

Its seems to make more sense to let a PDA but nice and lightweight to carry during the day but then connect a harddrive for downloading pics in the evening.
It seems a waste to not repurpose this drive and am willing to get another enclosure (like the addonics pcmcia enclosure) to make this work. Anyway, I'm off to the local CompUsa and BestBuy to see if they still have any NX deals.

Keep the ideas coming!
-Shell

[Alistar]

Well it seems that the card in the first post would make the Clie a master for USB devices. I would think that communicating with the card is the hardest, the card itself would handle the usb connection/communicataion. I would think simply writing the driver to communicate properly with the card would be all that is needed.

[IndyMCSE]

Another thing you must take into consideration is that if you could use the Clie to "drive" an external USB device through the CF slot, this would drain the battery in no time flat. It may not be worth the trouble on the current Clie models. Perhaps future models will have larger capacity batteries that are also removable like the NZ.

[hansschmucker]

You might want to take a look at this:
http://lists.soekris.com/pipermail/soekris-tech/2003-March/002018.html
It tells you how to connect an IDE drive to a CF slot directly. Now, all you need is an independant power source.

Since the CF/IDE interfaces are pretty much identical, that should work! (Using the CF drivers in development)

[Alistar]

Interesting. I think I'll try it out when the CF drivers become available.

[bright_day]

And once someone with some driver takes a whack at this, please share! As for the power required, I think a separate battery pack *rechargable for course* would be a must.

[CopyCat]

I think you guys should just wait till they make notebooks the size of PDA's because that is what you are asking for.

Not happy yet with the ability to use a 4gig CF card? I personally would not want to carry around the extra size and wieght of an extra HDD. I dont need more than a few gigs anyways, even though I am also in digital photography. On site I always have my notebook anyways so transfering the TIFF images from my 10D is no problem at all.

Anyways, I guess it would be cool for some people to have this. Kudos if it happens.