GP32 An idea


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In work I've been given a Lacie 40gig pocket drive. It works off both Firewire, and USB. The Firewire also supplies power to the drive, for USB usage a seperate power adaptor is needed. The drives are about the same size as a GP32. Is there any way that this could be hooked up to the GP32 via the expansion port at the GP32's base, or through the GP32's USB connector? I'm sure that you would have to power the drive externally - but 40gig to hook up :)

Also, I gotta justify this GP32 to my Girlfriend... so I was thinking how about some Gym software being written for it? You could put MP3's in it to play at cetain times etc... - just a thought.
 
If it has it's own power supply, you could be on to a winner. The only problem would be that someone would have to right a driver for it.
 
:) I wonder what support for USB the GP32's native driver provides out the box. Its a shame that I never really got into coding. I work as a tech - but my knowledge is only really that of maintenance, not design...
 
I understand that the GP32's USB port is a slave-only device. Meaning, it can't control anything, only be controlled by a PC.

As for the EXT port... It may be possible, but I don't know how fast it could be. It would probably end up working like the game wallet for GBA. You could use your 40gb drive for mass storage, but you'd have to transfer files to the SMC to actually run them.
 
A slave device.. Bugger I feared that may have been the case - but cant you link two GP32's by it?

So it looks like some funky adaptor would be needed. I wonder what the transfer rate would be through the expanision port? I doubt that it would be hitting firewire speeds, but it may be faster than USB - it looks wide.

I wouldnt want to use it just for storage and have to copy it to the smc, as i have all together 200GB of hard disk space at home.
 
I doubt that the EXT port would be very fast at all, as it is currently only used for wireless gaming which doesn't require high transfer speeds
 
As far as i know, the USB port is both a slave and an unpowered master. So with an external power supply this is realistic. It has been brought up before but nobody has found and easy way to do it...
 
I'm not sure, but there could be some USB-driver stuff in the samsung example sources, or in the linuxkernel patches for s3c2400x, i'm pretty sure there was USB support in the linux kernel..

Dunno how hard it would be to snag it though.

---
mithris
 
Nope, but there is a Linux port to the PDA chip used in the gp32, and if that linux port supports USB hosting, then perhaps one could snag the code from there, and add some power to the usb devices through batteries or smth.

---
mithris
 
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