Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

[sonyman]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Hi Brendan, i have testet the Function from the DTP 800
MHR-> CC (Arm try to pick a DISC /Arms goes only 20mm down to the Drive or Input and goes up)-NOK
MHI-> CC (Arm try to pick a DISC /Arms goes only 20mm down to the Drive or Input)-NOK
MHL-> CC (Arm goes 20mm down)-NOK
MHA-> CC (Arm goes up to the turn point)-OK
MHP-> CC (Arm try to pick a DISC /Arms goes only 20mm down to the Drive or Input and goes up)-NOK
MHO-> CC (Turns the Arm to the Output spindel and release the Disc!)-OK
MHH-> CC (Parks the Arm to the Output spindel-OK
MIA-> SE (Arms try to pick a DISC /Arms goes no down to the Drive or Input)-NOK

Pick up/ load disc will not work!

Thanks / Bastian

[sonyman]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Hello Brendan, the delivery date for the RIMAGE Buring Software is the next Monday. I cant log witout the Software.
I have testet your Rimage DTP x000 Driver with 9600 baut.
Only the < Load CLI> Command can Control the Robotic ( a litle Tilt , Picker release, and a litle Pan)
The funktion is NOK but control it!

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Do you have software that allows you to monitor the serial ports?

e.g. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896644.aspx

One way to document the command set is to set up portmon (or a similar utility) to monitor the serial port and then run applications that are known to be compatible such as RImage's duplication software.

You can use the information in the portmon logs to document the command set.

And then I will write you a driver.

-brendan

[sonyman]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Dear Brendan,
i have connetet the DTP 800 with my PC via Telnet.
Only working setting is:9600 8n1 /none. Only one Command " I <Enter>" gives CC40828
all others --> "IC"
How can i reed the SW Version?

Thanks Bastian

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Hello,
i need a Robotic Driver for my Rimage DTP 800 /RAS6 (FW+Serial)
and a wire plan for serial cable.

Thanks for your support!

Can you point me to documentation on the command set for this unit (I suspect it may differ from the other DTP models)?

I have a page for serial-based DTP units here:

http://hyperdiscs.pbwiki.com/Command+Sets+--+RImage

It assumes the DTP-800 works like the DTP-1000 and DTP-4000. Can you use hyperterminal to validate that info for me?


-brendan

[sonyman]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Hello,
i need a Robotic Driver for my Rimage DTP 800 /RAS6 (FW+Serial)
and a wire plan for serial cable.

Thanks for your support!

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

I got my hands on an Acronova DupliQ. It works pretty well. I attached a thin piece of foam just above the output tray edge and used your t-shirt idea to make a little slide where they land on another piece of foam. So far, so good.

My only complaint is that the Pioneer drive seems to have difficulty reading discs. I get a lot of "Secure (warning)" messages on discs that have no problems with my desktop setup. I may try to swap the drive later today and see if that helps. Otherwise, the batch ripper is the greatest thing since sliced bread!!!

Thanks again, Brendan & Spoon!

You're quite welcome (well for the advice part which was my contribution ).

I seem to recall that spoon said pioneer drives don't have very good C2 support, perhaps that's what you're seeing?

As usual with drive replacements, make sure you're going to be able to put the original drive back in correctly positioned, just in case. And also make sure to dremel or cut down any of the little disc-holding-clips in the tray, they can interfer with picks and places.

If you plan to use the duplicator for the original purposes, some duplication software (if you use it) will ignore drives not on a whitelist, though this probably isn't an issue for the dupliq as it uses Nero IIRC. e.g. I replaced a dead Pioneer with a Hitachi drive in a six-drive mediatechnics duplicator robot, which works fine for testing, but the mf-digital scribe software ignores that replacement drive.

-brendan

[stevek1006]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Yes. I'd probably just cut up an old t-shirt to fit the reject drop area on the baxter-type unit as well as the table area next to it and affix it to the unit.

I got my hands on an Acronova DupliQ. It works pretty well. I attached a thin piece of foam just above the output tray edge and used your t-shirt idea to make a little slide where they land on another piece of foam. So far, so good.

My only complaint is that the Pioneer drive seems to have difficulty reading discs. I get a lot of "Secure (warning)" messages on discs that have no problems with my desktop setup. I may try to swap the drive later today and see if that helps. Otherwise, the batch ripper is the greatest thing since sliced bread!!!

Thanks again, Brendan & Spoon!

-Steve

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Brendan: Thanks for the information, it is extremely helpful. A couple of quick questions. For those devices that do not have a reject pile, I assume the batch ripper will produce a report so that I can easily determine which discs were rejected.

Yes.

Second, concerning the Baxter, I assume it would be relatively easy to build something to safely catch the rejects if I ended up going the route.

Yes. I'd probably just cut up an old t-shirt to fit the reject drop area on the baxter-type unit as well as the table area next to it and affix it to the unit.

-brendan

[stevek1006]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

For batch ripper used, I'd recommend unit in the following order ...

Brendan: Thanks for the information, it is extremely helpful. A couple of quick questions. For those devices that do not have a reject pile, I assume the batch ripper will produce a report so that I can easily determine which discs were rejected. Second, concerning the Baxter, I assume it would be relatively easy to build something to safely catch the rejects if I ended up going the route. Thanks again.

-Steve

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

You could always add a 5th drive to the composermax at the cd printer position. The robot does not know or care if its a printer or a cd drive.

Yes, if you place the drive at the right height properly...but in this case you might also need to adjust the command line scripting to support it, since it isn't in a normal drive position. I don't think it would require any code changes to the ULCLI, as long as you weren't planning to use multiple drivebank= values (code is currently limited to 1 and 2) and set drivebank=1 for all drives (since the printer position interferes with both banks).

[EliC]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

You could always add a 5th drive to the composermax at the cd printer position. The robot does not know or care if its a printer or a cd drive.

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

1. One of the nice things about the Batch Ripper is that it "farms out" all automation duties to plug-in drivers on a drive-by-drive basis. This allows you to mix and match automation devices. I've already shown my drivers (ULCLI based) operating two robots from two different manufacturers in parallel.

But even if you only have one robot, you can benefit from this. For example, spoon has elsewhere posted the PX-230a drives are good for trying to recover data from difficult discs, while PX-708 drives may be a better all-purpose drive. So, fill a 4-drive robot with PX-708 drives, configure them with the robot, and then attach one or two PX-230a drives as manually loaded drives. Configure them accordingly. When you launch the batch ripper, enable all five or six drives.

During the batch, you can check every hour or so and extract rejected discs (clean them if necessary) and load them into the manual-load PX-230a drives *while the batch is running*.

2. Another benefit of the batch ripper approach is that it doesn't care how many drives you assign to a particular robot, even if the robot is not expandable. This gave me an idea of something to try. For example, say you have a one-drive robot* like the Amtren Flexwriter I (aka Discmakers Elite Micro/Micro Ultra aka Ripstation 7601X) and you also have a two or four drive manual load external "tower". Assuming you could position the two units just right, the drives present opened trays with proper load/unload clearance, and you removed the tray-end if necessary, you might be able to get the one-drive robot to reliably also work the tower drives, not just the built in drive! That one drive robot becomes a three or five drive robot...

Note that I have not tried this yet. Some device firmware "cares" about what tray height it encounters the drive tray at, but based on some experiments earlier this year I think this particular one-drive robot (amtren/discmakers/7601x) would work.

3. Similar to #2 above, but dealing with robots that care about tray height (Primera Composer, Composer XL, Composer Pro), you'd have to limit yourself to placing a drive/drives right at the same pick location as the drive(s) in the unit, but facing opposite the unit's drive(s). An additional concern would be that you'd also need to immobilize the external drive, since it wouldn't be in a massive tower and would be easy to jostle out of alignment. Still you could double the drive number (two for Composer/Composer XL, four for Composer Pro).

-brendan

* the baxter/minicubis/pico/dupliq/7601(no x) units not included due to the different API (not ulcli).

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

>does have a separate output space for Rejects, but unfortunately it drops them "over the back shoulder" which isn't nice for precious CDs

You could put a bin next to the table so they go straight into the trash

Heh. That is probably what the original designers thought as well, since it was engineered as a duplicator - rejects *are* trash.

Of course, you could coat the area behind the arm with felt to lessen the potential scratchiness of the over-the-shoulder reject style. I never did, since my first run through my own (small) collection was with a dupliq a couple years back (with riptastic and a custom loader batch file) and I hadn't thought about the handling issue.

-brendan

[Spoon]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

>does have a separate output space for Rejects, but unfortunately it drops them "over the back shoulder" which isn't nice for precious CDs

You could put a bin next to the table so they go straight into the trash