I have had a desire for a long time to build a sort of "universal media reader" machine with the intention of reading any legacy media I might run across. This is one of those project ideas that has been sitting in the back of my head for a long, long, time. Recently, I looked around at hardware lying around, and realized that I had most of the parts to build the thing (or, at least, a good start on it).
...we'll just ignore the part where I ended up buying ~80% of the parts over again because of PSU/case/etc incompatibilities, shall we?
So, after an ebay shopping spree and a couple false starts, I have the initial hardware platform built. I changed cases after buying the motherboard, so actually have an ATX board on order that should be shipping out on Monday, so there is still going to be change, but here's where we are right now.
There wasn't really any modding involved, so no build pictures. The interesting part is the components themselves.
So what are those components?
The CPU/etc are fairly boring: Athlon II x2, 1GB of RAM (soon to be 4GB), and a 430W Corsair PSU. What is really interesting is the media/readers.
So what are in all those bays?
Stepping down from the top:
Storage Drawer (currently contains USB-SATA/IDE/miniIDE adapter, USB-IR adapter, and PCMCIA-PocketZip drive...more on that later)
500GB HDD
2x 60GB Corsair Force LS SSD + universal media card reader (USB2.0, M2, T-Flash, XD, SD, CF, MS)
ODD#1 (BD-ROM, BD-DL, HD-DVD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-ROM)
ODD#2 (DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, CD-ROM)
5.25" Floppy
Zip 750 (750, 250, and 100MB Zip)
LS-120 SuperDisk (3.5" floppy, 120MB SuperDisk)
[Empty]
Storage Drawer (currently empty)
Moving around to the back, we have PCMCIA, ExpressCard 34/54, eSATA, and USB2.0 (new MBB will provide FireWire400 as well).
With the possible exception of the PocketZip (haven't figured it out yet), I can confirm that everything works.
On the docket for this projects:
Automate new media detection.
Automate media data scraping.
Automated upload of scraped media to cloud storage (will be starting with S3/Glacier).
Web front-end to control and monitor the system.
Audio and Video media ingestion (cassette tape, 8-track, LP, VHS, BetaMax, LaserDisc).
SIM card reader.
RS232
Flatbed scanner with doc-reader (printed/written media, punch cards)