Hi All,

 Sorry for off-topic message, but the piclist seems to me to be the best
EE forum, where such a strange project could be announced.
 I have an idea of small device, which could make life of digital
photocameras users much easier. The SmartMedia cards are rather expensive,
and taking the laptop everywhere is neither safe nor convenient.
 So I think that a simple mass storage for digital photocameras would be
useful. It could contain just a microcontroller equipped with serial
interface and able to emulate an IDE interface.

 The basic functions should be very simple:

1) Downloading the pictures from the cammera (through RS232) & erasing of
  succesfully downloaded pics
2) Uploading the pictures to the PC (through RS232) & deleting of
  successfully transferred pics

 The additional functions could be useful as well:
3) Uploading of selected pictures to the camera
4) Deleting of selected pictures

 So the device could be very simple. It could contain only uC (eg 16F877),
IDE HD (I'm going to use an old but good 200MB HD), the numeric LCD display
(to inform about number of selected picture or number of pictures written on
disk or to show the progress of transmission) and probably a few interface
circuits.

 The details of protocol may be found eg. in file protocol.htm included in
the freely available "photocd" software (for using dig. cams with Linux).
(Or in http://www.average.org/digicam/ website)

 I'm interested in any comments regarding such design and in any pointers
considering the PIC<->IDE HD connectivity.

--
                        TIA
                        Wojciech Zabolotny
                        http://www.ise.pw.edu.pl/~wzab

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