Apple PowerCD Base Station / Dock Teardown

[Garrett]

I know this is an obscure piece of Apple hardware, but I think they're neat because the color matches the old PowerBooks. I have two of these - one working and one not. Because I couldn't find any photos of the base online, I disassembled my defective unit to take a look around. For what it does, this a complex piece of hardware. I think the larger board is the SCSI controller board, and guessing the smaller top board is for power delivery/interfacing with the drive itself. I was hoping the fix for me would be leaky electrolytic caps, but all I see are through-hole parts which aren't leaking. When connected to a working drive, the orange LCD lights up, but a disc will never spin, and nothing else ever displays on the screen.

Anyone else been inside one of these wacky things?

 

[misterg33]

I love these things. Such a cool "futuristic" device back when it was released. The docks have a tendency to fail, so I hope you are successful in repairing it!!

 

[Trash80toG4]

I did a nice workup years back at the MLA, but I think actual content was lost in the great pixel robbery.

PowerCD Base Unit Teardown Pics . . .

. . . posted in their own thread as I thought that they might be of general interest. Another comrade set off my "gotta know, gotta see what's goin' on" reaction in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=11701 As you can see, there's a whole lotta stuff inside the PowerCD's Base Unit...

68kmla.org

Lots of people tried hooking a SCSI cable up to the most definitely non-SCSI DB-25 interface of the flying saucer and complained "it didn't work!" Heaven only knows what might have happened. Hope you can sort yours out.

I'll have to see if mine is still functional. What processor is that? PowerCD did all kinds of interesting things as a standalone toy, like playing PhotoCD slideshows.

 

[Elemenoh]

all I see are through-hole parts which aren't leaking

Just because they aren’t leaking doesn’t mean they’re in spec. Do you have access to an ESR meter to test them?

What about that cap that looks like a SMD part on the power board. Is that really a tantalum or is it one of those sneaky electrolytics like those used in the newton?

Other than caps, you could check the diodes and transistors on that board to rule out more easy to test stuff.

 

[This Does Not Compute]

The PowerCD is just a modified version of the Philips CDF-100. The Philips unit played CDs and Photo CDs, but didn't support SCSI. An educated guess: Based on what I'm seeing on those PCBs, they're getting the raw data from the laser assembly and doing all the "processing" (the larger board has a familiar NCR SCSI chip), so the Photo CD and audio playback smarts are likely in the drive unit itself. I wouldn't be surprised if you stuck a CDF-100 drive on a PowerCD base and the SCSI interface worked.

I've seen/had several PowerCDs over the years, and they've all had issues with the drive mechanisms in one way or another. I don't think issues with the electronics in the base are very common.

 

[Fizzbinn]

The PowerCD is just a modified version of the Philips CDF-100. The Philips unit played CDs and Photo CDs, but didn't support SCSI. An educated guess: Based on what I'm seeing on those PCBs, they're getting the raw data from the laser assembly and doing all the "processing" (the larger board has a familiar NCR SCSI chip), so the Photo CD and audio playback smarts are likely in the drive unit itself. I wouldn't be surprised if you stuck a CDF-100 drive on a PowerCD base and the SCSI interface worked.

I've seen pictures of the Philips CDF-100 where it looks like the connector used between the drive and base appears to be a DB-9 connector unlike the DB-25 of the the PowerCD so unfortunately I don't think that would work (at least physically).

Found one:

Photo CD Player CDF 100 R-Player Philips Belgium Belgien, build |Radiomuseum.org

Photo CD Player CDF 100 R-Player Philips Belgium Belgien, build 1993, 8 pictures, 2 schematics, Belgium, tubes, semiconductors, Sound/Video Recorder and/or

www.radiomuseum.org