P2 Firewire Adapter

Are both drivers supplied from Duel or is the PCMCIA driver from Panasonic ?

Is there any picture on the planet of a disassembled P2 card ?
 
The PCMCIA driver is the standard P2 driver from Panasonic.

Andrew Hoffman from Spec-Comm posted pictures of the inside of a P2 card before, they should still be in the archives.
 
I´d score a used 4Gb and open it.
Should be affordable for a company with an own R&D department.
I, as many, would like to see a solution for this problem.
If you succeed, you´ll have many happy buyers here.
Don´t forget a FW800 version, please.
 
I would get a 16GB card or larger -- they use SDHC memory and probably a different ASIC than either the 4GB or 8GB cards.
 
please help me to find the posted pictures of the open P2 card.

Yes we have a R&D department but until now we are in evaluation and no project is opened - that´s why I like the low cost style in the beginning.

BTW all the R&D cost must be compensated in the long run that means the more cost efficient we do it the cheaper will be the adapter in the end.

We have done some other projects with raid of CF and SD cards in another formfactor. The IC we used was from a jap. Company and they acted very strange and we had to sign tons of paper to get a spec and some samples. Perhaps we are lucky and Panasonic used the same IC´s. The chance is pretty good because there are not many companies around have such IC´s.

First we have to identify the components inside to do a proper evaluation.
 

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For those of you who posted the link to the USB2 to PC Cardbus II reader that was 32-bit, I contacted the company:

"Thank you for your inquiry,

The PCD-X/U132-E can only read 32 bit broadband wireless cards. It will not support your Panasonic card. Right now we do not have any external devices that would support your card.

Best Regards
Monica"

So, no luck there.
 
Barry_Green said:
Yes, every piece of P2 equipment needs a driver. In the case of the Duel Adapter, you actually need two drivers: one for the duel adapter, and then a second one for the PCMCIA P2 card.
Click to expand...

actually - on a mac you do not need both these drivers, itll function fine with just the panasonic driver -

i never installed the duel adpater driver on my laptop
 
David S. said:
For those of you who posted the link to the USB2 to PC Cardbus II reader that was 32-bit, I contacted the company:

"Thank you for your inquiry,

The PCD-X/U132-E can only read 32 bit broadband wireless cards. It will not support your Panasonic card. Right now we do not have any external devices that would support your card.

Best Regards
Monica"

So, no luck there.
Click to expand...

yeah - i just contacted them too - bummer
 
lol @ wgzn
I'd go buy a 4GB P2 card and start experimenting.
The bandwidth from PCMCIA kicks the snot outta firewire. Kinda strange to work backwards through a bus like that.
 
ProfessorU said:
lol @ wgzn
The bandwidth from PCMCIA kicks the snot outta firewire. Kinda strange to work backwards through a bus like that.
Click to expand...


I believe the point was just to secure an inexpensive reader for Macs and PCs with Firewire ports for transferring.

I for one who love to have that capability; it would work with both laptops and desktops.
 
I agree that your CF RAID controller pictured probably uses the same IC as the P2 card. I can't imagine there are a lot of options for a manufacturer to use.
However, there will be circuit changes in the cards 16GB and above. Maybe the RAID chip will be the same. Maybe not.

If you figure out how to get this to work, this is not the device you should be building. You should be building the p2 cards instead. The materials cost for a 32GB card would be around $400 and if you had one today you could get $2,000 for it.
 
Here is a link to the p2 whitepaper in case it helps you. www.abelcine.com/store/pdfs/P2-WhitePaper.pdf It would be great if you can get it to work. Goodluck
 
Thank´s the link helped a little bit. On friday I talked with our head of the r&d and we will go for it.

right now we have only 2 options:

only fire800 or only usb2.0

I don´t like like usb stuff and would prefer fire800. any comments ?

it is very likely to get a 2 pcmcia slot solution for a very minor price upgrade.

In the worst case we will have only one in the best case we will have 2 p2 slots.

in 10 days we will do the first tests. :badputer:

let´s hope the best. updates follow soon.
 
Rebuilding P2 is not an option.

As far as I know there are some patents designed in the the P2 therefor Panasonic can control the product very well. I know at least one company reverseenginnered the P2 cards. they said it was not very hard to break the barriers.

to make it short.

they got a letter from panasonic which offered 2 choices.
1) license the technology for a incredible high money.
2) get sued

if you ask me - hell freezes first - there will be no other choice then panasonic. these japanese guys know how to protect their business. they all do their proprietary storage stuff. I don´t think that sonys SxS will be campatible to anything else. common it´s sony. think of the atrac audio codec the memory stick ...... they will and can keep all the other competitors out of the ring. who would´t do that either.
 
You make money by selling tape/solidstatestorage, not cameras.
I don´t think it´s a conspiracy theory when saying "the HVX only exists to sell P2".:evil:
(Yes, you can of course even record HD via FW400 from the HVX. But still. )

Ah, forgot: FW800 would please all MacUsers, but it´s rarely used on PCs...
Would be nice to know how many P2 users edit on a Mac and how many on a PC.
 
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Firewire performs much better, but it will limit your customer base. There are far more system with USB2 than there are systems with FW800.
 
Let´s do firewire800 first. if this is working fine then we can think of usb ethernet or esata. or a one pushbutton copy to a harddisk device.
 
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