I know that I can get an adapter to throw a CF card on an IDE chain, but is there a way to do this in reverse? In other words, is there a way to wire an IDE drive to a CF card interface as long as use a seperate power source? If so, I gotta REAL cool project in the making
Not really sure myself. I beleive CF standard is mostly just flash memory. It has memory address lines and data lines with a coupe of control lines. Making a controller interface that takes the IDE protocol to translate data read/writes to the compact flash is not that difficult. But trying to get that same controller to mimic the IDE interface is a completely different matter. I wouldnt say its impossible, but it would probably move really really slow.
Basically no. CF has like 2 ways of been used, the first is basically IDE, the latter is its own protocol (see http://www.compactflash.org/). If the device is using the CF card in an IDE way, then yes it might be possible but once again i doubt it, the timing of a CF card is VERY differn't to that of an HDD. If you tell us the project we might be able to think of a way for it to work thou!
I was thinking it was possible in such a way that a controller would 'emulate' the CF protocol in order to store something like 256 bytes or more, then halt in order to send that block to the modified IDE connection in that protocol. Hence why I said it was possible, but would be very slow.
As I understand it - not all CF cards support the ATA like interface - so I would expect most CF card using devices to default to using CF's own protocol.
Yea, I was thinking about it a little while ago and figured that what I wanted to do wouldn't work. Oh well. I bought a gadget that hooks up to my TV which will display pics off of a CF, Microdrive or Smart Media card. I was thinking that I might be able to wire up a laptop drive to the CF slot to turn it into a picture "book" for the tv. I bought this thing because of the deal I got for it. It was originally $60 at Walmart, but marked down to $54, then to $35 and finally on clearance for $15
You could probably still do it with a bit of hacking, odds are it will be reading the image directly from the CF, then buffering the decompressed (i am guessing it reads jpeg) into a SRAM buffer, in turn fed into a display chip. Odds are datasheets will be nocking about for all of these, you could make a pic emulate the CF card, but you would need to know which mode the device used to access the CF card. Most often this is the IDE esc interface, in which case with a micro in between, you could *probably* hook a HDD straight up, timing would still be an issue thou.
