www.makemkv.com

HiI purchased a CD DVD duplicator robot off of eBay and thought that I could upgrade it to use USB. but it has no usb. I started looking more into it after I got the unit. I found out that it does not support native USB. So I guess my real question is what parts do I need to make it work so that I can back up 5,000 discs? I like the technical skills to hack one. What I would like to do is take the unit cheaply swap the guts out for example upgrade kit from vinpowered digital and voila! It works with Windows so that way I can use makemkv, handbrake and IMG burn with it.

TLDR; if you've assembled a 3D printer and can do the most basic "Arduino programmimg" the conversion can be had for about $60usd and 6hrs time.

To convert it to command and control you need to swap out the stepper or servo controller and add a driver. For both servo and stepper motors you can buy a new controller for about $60usd (or use a $5 ESP32), drivers are about $20. From there it becomes a little more technical as you'll have to wire the existing servos/steppers to the board and test each voltage and current values to match the drivers. If you understand C programming, then that was the hardest part and it's all down hill from there. If you don't understand C programming you can use AI tools to write the code and explain how to flash the controller but... Ai is really bad at this. Ai fails laughably bad at all things "Arduino" that is any more technical than lighting an LED so you need to be prepared to learn this yourself. Luckily it's very simple to learn since a "Hello World" using a prebuilt stepper library is pretty much all you need.

If you post the model I can tell you how easy it would be for me to do. I've done this a couple times before and the hard/frustrating part for me is the chosen wiring harnesses and motors used on any given auto-loader. If I wouldn't do it for any give model, then I don't think most people would, most people would simply choose a different model. The 400-600 hundred disc loaders that come with 4 or 5 drives are the easiest.

Models that look like this are the easiest: https://www.ebay.com/itm/326658515499?_ ... 6E9DMMVKGG

There's bigger models that are difficult because of their size and there's small models that are difficult because of their working room inside. Basically you want a model that has everything underneath of it, that way you can flip it on its back and rewire/redo everything from there.

NOTE: The pickup tool varies from model to model but do not get one with a vacuum pickup tool, they work OK until they fail miserably.

Since I an electronics miserably and I felt program miserably. I picked up one that looks like a cube model. That was rebranded by a third party company and I'm just trying to upgrade it to USB support so that I can control the robot arm so I don't have to sit there and swap 25 discs at a time. To go along with my my 5000 disc project.

Could someone help me reverse engineer this so that I can control it with USB? Help me find a drop-in replacement. It's a cube model 2