💾 Archived View for owo.pm › electronics › consoles › cdi.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:26:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I was thrifting in my secret place in Black Lake, and I stumbled on a wierd looking device burried with CD players. There was this strange mini-din connector in the front and that got me interested. I took the unit to check the back. That's when I noticed the video output. No regular CD player shoud have a video output! So I took a good look at the front and wow, this had the CD-Interactive logo on the CD tray. I knew I had something special in my paws. At 30 Canadian ruppees, I felt obliged to take it home, and so I did!
The unit was in pretty good shape, no apparent damage. It came without any controllers, and without the "Digital Video Cartridge". This meant no MPEG-1 decoding capabilities. The tray was also having issues closing and opening. I changed the belt to fix the issue. I went on Ebay later to acquire the said "Digital Video Cartridge". But without controllers, there's not much the unit can do, only start playing a music disc or confirm the launch of a game.
We went to our local electronic store (shoutout electromike !) to buy two mini-din 7 pins connectors, and we interfaced the thing with an Arduino. According to documentation on the interwebs, CD-i controllers uses serial communication instead of an analog system. There's even libraries to interface an Arduino with the CDI. We paired our Arduino Uno to a KS0153 keyestudio JoyStick Shield to make a controller, not a very ergonomic one, but at least a functionnal one. While we are 'code-complete', the thing doesn't seem to work. We'll have to dig a little more into the documentation to understand what is wrong. We went straight ahead with the CDI and the controller but the next step would be to send simple hard-coded commands to the CDI first. Stay tuned for more updates on that project!
Ks0153 keyestudio JoyStick Shield documentation
The Arduino CDI controller library
