The Savage Salvaging (aka the "bigboote" device)

At this point, while digging around the entire house for various things, I found two interesting tidbits :

- a broken radio-controlled car in my son's room. It was powered by a 4.8V pack of 4 cells, less powerful but much lighter and smaller than the battery pack, and by another small miracle it still had its charger ;

- a compact hub for laptops -- actually a USB1.1 trinket with a contractor's logo on it, but small, light and transparent. I saw that although it was unpowered the PCB had room for a power socket, just like bigboote's.

So I read up on bigboote's post and soldered two wires in places that would bring power both to the hub's and to the host's ports, unlike a normal hub. Then I had to hack a plug for connecting those wires to the power pack (from an ATX molex plug).

In this mode the Y cable is gone, and the hub has a male A on the host side, so it connects directly to the gender changer on the 770, making for a much less encumbered situation. In my view this an acceptable mobile setup, at the cost of reduced autonomy (but the power pack can be improved uopn easily). It is no less powerful though : just to get even with the ipodders I connected my iRiver H340 to the hub, it was detected and mounted without a hitch, and sudddenly I had 40 GB of disk space on the 770 (at USB1.1 speeds, but hey :-)

Note: spurious reboot here also when carelessly uplugging USB from 770...

http://www.internettablettalk.com/ga...oto/66/cat/503
http://www.internettablettalk.com/ga...oto/67/cat/504

With H340:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/ga...oto/68/cat/503