Hi Mike,

I have had a digital camera for a while now (Fuji FinePix 40i). Hope
the following ideas help.

My camera came with a 32MB SmartMedia memory card and I bought a
128MB card for a 2 week overseas trip. I get really excellent photo's
at 1280 x 960 resolution (great 4 x 6" prints) and can store 100
photo's on the 32MB card and 400 photo's on the 128MB card. The price
has dropped heaps on the 128MB cards now, tempting me to think I
wouldn't hesitate to buy another one if I were going on an even
longer trip. Not necessarily trying to talk you out of it but you get
a fair bit of memory card for the price of a hard drive these days.

Back to project ideas though: USB card readers for PC's are cheap and
work well. That gives you a good connector for the card. Then you
need a USB master controler. Not many ideas there sorry. IDE
interfaces for micro's have been done before though.

Another idea I can visualize is a 3.5" floppy drive sitting on top of
a 3.5" hard drive. Buy a memory card floppy drive adaptor and bang,
all your hardware is done for you. With this scheme the floppy drive
and hard drive interfaces are very similar and may be able to share
circuitry and software in your micro interface. Just detect the
floppy inserted and dump all contents into a new folder on the hard
drive and turn an LED on to say it's done. Maybe put the hard drive
in a removable bay to make it easy to get the data back into your PC.

Sounds easy, but I know there will be a heap of work involved.
Probably more software than anything else.
--
Brent Brown, Electronic Design Solutions
16 English Street, Hamilton, New Zealand
Ph/fax: +64 7 849 0069
Mobile/txt: 025 334 069
eMail:  brent.brown@clear.net.nz

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