WebDT 366, and beyond the stars.

Ive given up any hopes in hell to make a mating connector for my WebDT 366 IDE Flashrom Board, so I ripped out the 2mm pin header which is only half height. Surprisingly it was quite simple! Back breaking, tedious, and utterly mind-numbing, but I think many people can do it, granted they are comfortable with a soldering iron. Seeing how I had a busted IDE cable from previous attempts to get an IDE cable modded and working, I chose to solder the cable directly into the motherboard. Yeah... dont do that, major pain in the ass. You can easily install a normal height 2mm header so you can use a regular IDE cable. From there you can use almost any style IDE drive you want to use. ALMOST ANY IDE DRIVE!

The WebDT 366 IDE bus is limited to 3.3V drives, and no more than 350mA or so. I havent tested it exactly how much amperage it can handle. 300mA drives work fine, my CF cards are rated fr that, 500mA does not. Now we can "borrow" power from the USB port, but with my current direct-wire hookup, its not easy to disconnect the +3.3v lead from the board. After all, we dont want to directly hook something that can handle more voltage and amperage into the IDE +V line, now do we? NO! We do not! Of course the first thing that comes to mind is USB. Granted I think the USB on the WebDT is useless beyond text/mouse input, the dock does have some USB lines I will have a very unlikely chance of ever using. I can/will mod some of my IDE to CF afapters, and 44 pin to 1.8" IDE (aka iPod Drive) adapters so they directly take power off of the USB on the interna cradle connection, which leads to a 2mm pin header anyways. The mod will be pretty simple in general, granted you can grasp the general concept.


This is the general idea. Compact Flash drives work, but they are somewhat slow in PIO only modes. I used a 6GB microdrive that detected, but it drew 500mA (labeled on the drive itself) and I had major issues with what seemed to be random power brown-outs. Here is a stock install of XP Pro 2 with the themes pulled out, and some very minor optimizations. The OS still needs some work, but thats a matter of personal preference and wont really get into it.

Now for something kinda' cool. You may or may not know, I am into ham radio. Not the typical two fat fucks talking over a static repeater link about local news, weather, and bowel movements. There is a LOT more to the hobby. One of them being Slow Scan TV. Its is a method of encoding digital images into an analog signal and transmitting it over a radio carrier. Its like TV... but slower.. get it.. SLOW Scan TV (SSTV from herein).

SSTV was used on many space missions for imaging, and I am talking back in the 1960's. Technology has improved just a wee bit over the past few decades. Getting the hardware to get SSTV going isnt all too taxing in general. I loaded up MMHAMSOFT's SSTV software on my friend Ugster's WebDT, and on my laptop (for now, I dont have the right audio connectors) hooked into my Handheld Radios (HT Radio). One is a cheap $60 FD-460A 70Cm band (440Mhz) and the other is a Yaesu FT-60 dual band (google it). With some basic audio patch cables and software set up, we started sending some images.

The image is actually a macro shot of my eye using a Playstation 2 Eyetoy USB Webcam with drivers hacked to be used under windows, and a red LED for a backlight. The radio as stated is an FDC-460A