Wires / connections
by eric.agan on Jan.26, 2010, under eiCAD
Still alive! Another project has kept me very busy as of late.. One that will avoid the undesirable situation of trying to evolve beyond the need to eat.
I’ve been taking a few steps back lately on eiCAD: the shape system was originally designed to be extremely flexible and still fairly simple. As I began moving to C++ using Qt, I changed it around a bit to be less flexible, but more tuned to work with Qt’s built-in graphics handling classes. This made life easier for a lot of things, but as I tried to implement wires (nets / traces / connections / …) — pictured above — I ran into a serious conflict of interest with Qt’s handling of selecting and moving QGraphicsItems. Overriding some default implementations makes everything work in harmony.
P.S. Don’t take this as a posting against Qt — quite the contrary! Qt has made life easy on this project, and as with any project you will probably run into a situation where your tools don’t quite fit the bill. The fun part is the challenge of either changing the tools, or the design, to meet the same goals. 
February 15th, 2010 on 21:48
I am sorry about the off-topic, but it’s only now that I came across to your post here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/20882-10-opinions-drive-emulator-device
Personally, I would love such a product.
But, I’d like the idea to be modified a bit:
It would be great if it were simply a ‘male-female converter’ whose one end (USB-male) connects to the PC and the other end (USB-female) receives Flash Drives.
IOW, we are not constrained by micro-SD card capacities which may or may not keep up with Flash Drives; and this ‘male-female converter’ acts to emulate a CD/DVD/BlueRay/Floppy drive.
I’d also like a similar device for FireWire (400 or more importantly 800) to USB Flash Drive adapter.
This would be heaven for Mac users who are unable to find FireWire flash drives.
Anyway, I’d like to know how far you’ve come along with it.
February 27th, 2010 on 10:49
John,
Sorry for the delay in my response, I’m too busy for my own good!
I really like your idea about having the male and female USB connectors! I think I’d throw in a microSD socket in addition to that for people who want it to be as compact as possible. As for FireWire, I agree it would be great to have; however, FireWire is a bit of a mess to work with (the chipset is physically large compared to USB, expensive, and last I checked it requires some funky licensing with Apple).
I’ve got some rough designs, but I haven’t produced any prototypes yet as I’ve been focusing on other work and the initial response wasn’t very good. Lately though I’ve had quite a few people say they really want this device, so I may set aside a few days and try to crank out a prototype. If/when I do, I’ll be sure to notify you and post something on this blog.
Thanks very much for your interest, and hopefully I’ll have a USB CD/DVD/Floppy/BluRay/etc emulator available in the near future!
Oh, one other thing, what do you think is a reasonable price point for such a device? I’ll do my best to keep cost to a minimum, but since I’m a one-man band the general goal is to sell it for “somewhere under $150.”