Given the variety of… uh, non-traditional hardware that’s connected to my home theater, I’ve found the ground isolation provided by optical TOSLINK connections pretty handy. After poking around a bit, I found a stand alone coax to optical converter. It uses a hex inverter to convert the signals to TTL levels, and a Sharp (or toshiba with some extra components) optical transmitter.
16 thoughts on “DIY TOSLINK To SP/DIF Converter”
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1st?
Reminds me of what I need to eventually do…
Can’t you just wire an LED straight onto the toslink? I used to do this with old soundblaster digital outputs and it worked ok.
..sorry I meant onto the coaxial.
It works like glove. Build this baby back in 1995 for my Philips receiver Sony MD. Back then I built it from the design which came from http://www.elektuur.nl. They covered conversion in both ways. SP/DIF -> COAX
this is great!
Anyone know whether this would work with video? I’d like to make a fiber video link.
ooo, fibre video, very nice.
That reminds me, I need to try out fibre networking at some point. 10GB Ethernet woo.
Nick
Posting is titled
“DIY TOSLINK to SP/DIF converter”
but picture is annotated “Coax In” and “TOSLINK OUT” so it is really a SP/DIF to TOSLINK converter.
This really is for the DIY’r because you can buy a coax to optical converter for about $20-$35 online (depending on how good a deal you can find… shop.com shows one for a sticker price of 30.52 and pricewatch shows one for $22 shipped from cablewholesale.com). I like building stuff… but my time is better spent building things that I can’t get for the price of parts by a good margin… like maybe one of those DIY projectors… or something that simply isn’t available period.
Id love to see an optical to headphone jack conversion project. some true fta satellite channels only send ac3 signal, Id love to have an adapter so I could take just the left and right signal from the ac3 and use it on my cheapie stereo.
@sly,
if you’re a real DIY’r then you should have most of those parts lying around from previous projects, etc.
i think it would be much cheaper then the $22 you mentioned.
@thijs
well maybe I don’t have a shop that’s cluttered with extra parts considering I’m still paying off debts from college and married and live in an apartment. My point is that one can sometimes better spend their money on manufactured products and spend their time on projects that are truly original. Now back when this project first came about, it was original. It’s been picked up by a manufacturer and now it’s a mass product. Make a bi-di model, that would be original.
I want to try this with my wireless antenna project. I figure if i have the antenna on the roof and 6 inches of cable to the converter then optical and another converter for optical in and 6 inches of Coax out then there wouldn’t be much to Null attenuation. Any one point me to a reverse set of plans?
is possible to re-wire a USB cable to an ethernet cat 5?
Here is my problem: I have a USB only adsl moden and I want to route it into my wireless modem. But my wireless modem has only CAT 5 connections. I would like to know a quick dirty way to patch it.
Please reply to radiofranky@yahoo.com
appreciated
I need help on converting USB-> cat 5 ethernet connector.
What I’m try to resolve is I have an adsl modem with USB connction only and I would like to route into my newly purchased wireless router. However, the wireless router has only ethernet cat 5 connections..
does anyone knows how to do quick and dirty way to patch it?
I know there’re commercial converter out there, but it costs quite some..
please reply to radiofranky@yahoo.com
appreciated
Here’s the LED/resistor version http://leoricksimon.blogspot.com/2006/05/spdif-toslink-interface.html