I wouldnt call it a microdrive. Id call it easyflash. One day though i want to impliment an actual seagate microdrive into a robot. you know, for bragging rights.

A friend of mine has a p.o.c. robot dog with a sata 1TB drive and has been looking for something more solid state, the drive eats a lot of battery something like this would be nice if capacity was larger.

this product is a nice turnkey module for systems with small controllers, but if you are using any decent sized avr or pic there are software libraries that offer fat 16 & fat 32 (not sure about long filenames) file systems on drives, CF and SD.

There’s some other interesting stuff on their site. However, I have no idea how they justify charging $175 for a 3″ lcd touchscreen.

My nearspace group has been using this to log our flight data in raw mode. It’s worked very well, although it is a bit slow to keep track of our IMU data.

nearspace.0×58.com

i just bought one of their OLED displays. it’s amazing. the picaso graphics processor is awesome.

@andre

yeah, it has a poor video frame rate but i’m not using it for that. i’m building an OBDII HUD. the insane contrast ration makes it work great.

That’s the reality with all these embedded designs aimed towards modders and hackers from small vendors. It’s a profitable market right now, and all these blogs and zines feed it.

The PCB design is the only complexity in this solution. it’s one asic with a few passive components..they use another asic to do serial to uart, you could just buy the chips and make your own single board solution; for them two boards can make more money off padded costs.

yes, and it’s not even a good product. a software library is a better solution than that piece of crap for people with little brains. simpler, cheaper, easier to obtain.

a further reason not to use that crappy device and replace it with a software library which is not patentable (at least in europe) and can support fat32 without legal problems.

“This would sure be nice for datalogging purposes, but what about, say, MP3-players? Is it fast enough?

Posted at 9:49 am on Jul 21st, 2009 by entropia”

Microdrives were in the first generation iPod Nanos. People were finding it cheaper to buy an iPod Nano and crack it open for the Microdrive than to buy the Microdrives OEM. (The only instance in which I can point out that Apple actually was able to provide something equivalent for LESS.)

Microdrives are capable of roughly 4 to 8MB/sec in data transfers, so no, they’re not blazingly fast… but work. There are Compact Flash cards (Sandisk Ultra III series, for example) that are capable of UDMA modes and higher speeds. Microdrive just was preferable because it was cheaper per MB before and provided near infinite rewites compared to flash… in which both ways, Flash has since exceeded Microdrives for all intents and purposes.

But it’s all besides the point as the picture clearly shows that it’s a MicroSD flash card in a socket.

And yes, those are fast enough for MP3 players, too.

I’ve been looking for something like this to use in a project to add an SD-card to an old (80′s) Oric Atmos/Oric-1 computer .. its getting harder and harder to find the Oric microdisc drives, so we on defence-force.org have been discussing adding a virtualized ‘modern’ interface to the Oric so it can use SD cards.

This, combined with the Bus Pirate, may be just what I need to get a proof of concept done that demonstrates that such a thing is possible, so I’ve ordered one .. Hackaday, I’ll let you know if this simple modular solution, with a bit of glue software, ends up bringing our Oric-1′s and Atmos’s into the 21st Century.

And yes, for our needs, FAT16 is going to be *just fine*. :)