It’s been a long time since last update on raspberry frankenstein, so here’s an update.

After some trials, the power supply has shown its drawbacks. The 5 Volt supply did not provide enough power for the RPi and it is probably failing. The 12 Volt ATA circuitry seems to be still reliable enough to provide power.

So I bought some decent high power usb hub and re-did the internals of the project. The usb hub will provide power to the RPi and function as a powered usb hub. To do this, we have to “loop” the hub. The following pictures show the usb hub and the cabling.

The usb hub and the HDMI cables are held by zip ties (I had to drill a couple of holes for them), this also protects the HDMI cable from yanking.

To provide power to the hub I had to conceal the hub’s own power supply inside the case. I wanted to recycle the hub if anything goes wrong, so I did not want to break open the hub to power it. So I used a screw terminal to wire a socket inside the case, and attached the hub’s power supply to the socket. The thing is depicted in the following picture:

This way I can still use the power button at the front panel to power on the frankenstein. Luckly the hub’s power supply is very small and I could fit it under the case power socket, see:

I then attached the usb-to-IDE adapter to the hard disk. The hard disk itself is powered by the original KiSS power supply. The final setup looks like this:

Later on the hard disk proved faulty, so I replaced it with an external usb hard disk: since the hub is powerful enough, all I needed to do was to zip-tie the hard disk inside the case, and plug the hard disk to the hub.

Next phase would be to use the IDE cable to bring life to the DVD-reader, so that the KiSS re-gains its original functionality of being a DVD/DivX reader.