So I've had a very busy run of weekends, not leaving much time for hackery. Looks like Ben Heck has beaten me to the punch in modding a carousel. He connected his to an xbox 360. As well as spurring me on this has given me some good tips of how to do it.
The Ben Heck Show - A Real Game Changer
via Hackaday - Xbox 360 DVD changer is the ultimate in gaming laziness
Soon afterwards this other guy came out of the woodwork who had been working on a similar idea, this time for xbmc. He talks a lot about his software and the plugin but what I'm interested in at the moment is hardware.
extMEDIA
via Hackaday - extMEDIA: An XBMC disc changer interface
Great ideas, so I've made a plan breaking down the project into 3 stages. Firstly the basic hardware: actually getting the drive in and working and controlling the loading mechanism with something like a pic or an arduino. Secondly hooking the controller to the PC and working on some scripts or software to do useful things like indexing disc, load data from a bunch of discs to a harddrive, duplication, etc. And finally hooking up some of the buttons, remote, lcd panels etc to the controller for standalone control.
Obviously I don't want to wade in taking apart a £200 Bluray XL writer so to start with I am going to try to get an old spare DVD drive working in it.
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