Ceres - Easy USB Mass Storage Enabler
Ceres ( sîr ' ēz ) n. 1. The goddess of agriculture in Roman mythology. Daughter of Saturn and Ops. 2. The largest asteroid and the first to be discovered, having an orbit between Mars. 3. A new program that allows easy drag-and-drop access to movies on the CVS Camcorder. Version 0.1 of Ceres is now available at the sourceforge site. ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/saturntools/ ) It's basically a mass storage enabler. It works like this: Plug in the cam, launch the program, press Playback on the camcorder, hit ok. Then enjoy the direct access to your camcorder! I'm in the middle of cable woes right now - my beloved m100 cable that I used for the original dakota, pv2, and the camcorder was snapped off at the connector by my two year old son. He's a strong lad. Until I get a chance to replace it, I'll be minimally maintaining Ops and Ceres. I should be able to manage blind bugfixes, but I'll avoid adding anything new until I can eat my own dogfood. Ceres was compiled with the free Borland 5.5 compiler. I expect that most of it should be pretty easy to port elsewhere. Release notes follow... 0.1 Initial Release - 09/13/2005 -Ceres scans for USB devices. If it finds a Saturn Camcorder, it will attempt to Open, Unlock, and enable mass storage mode in the camcorder.

cable
BillW, I'd gladly give you a cable if you wish. You've done so much I'd be happy to ship you one for free. Please let me know.

works great. BillW is it possible for Ceres to run as a system service (daemon) and try to detect when a Saturn device has been plugged in. Once it is plugged it tells you to press the playback button??

webetics, that's a kind offer! Thank you very much, but I'm ok. I've got some fun plans to build something a bit non-standard. I'll get my act into gear soon enough. qodsec, running as a service is an interesting idea. It hadn't occurred to me, but that would be pretty handy. I haven't coded a service before, so I'll look into it. If it's easy enough I'll do it. If it's a pain, I may leave it be - I'm looking forward to the day that Ceres becomes obsolete, after we learn how to permanently enable mass storage mode in the firmware.

Works great! Thanks for the great work BillW!

I can't get it to work. Ops works fine, but when I use ceres, I get constant windows errors that say something like "No disk found", and I am forced to reboot.

Weird. Does the cam have any movies on it? If not, try taking a short clip before trying again. Also, you might try a "format media" operation in Ops. I'm guessing, but it sounds like Windows doesn't like something about the format of the "flash disk"it's seeing. If the errors appear intermittently, you might check your cable... especially if you sometimes get corrupted movies or have to repeat button pushes in Ops.

Putting a short movie on didn't help, nor did formatting. I am only getting this problem with one of my three cameras, but it is always the same camera, and that camera has no trouble with Ops in regular mode.

got anything like this for osx?

I have made a quick hack to my mac port of Saturn Download which enables Mass Storage mounting of the camera in OS X. Need to refine it a bit, will post it in a day or two.

BillW, Any chance of getting the updated MSS code into Ceres? The la-*test*-('") versions of Ops have had no problems getting my 3.62 and 3.70 FW cams into mass storage mode. :wink:

Nobody had asked prior to you, so I figured none of the 3.62 or 3.70 users were interested in running it! Porting the code over from Ops shouldn't take much effort, but I'm a bit cramped for time right now in the world of atoms. I'll take a look in the next little while. (how's that for not committing to a date?)

Re: Ceres - Easy USB Mass Storage Enabler
Version 0.2 of Ceres is now available at the sourceforge site. ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/saturntools/ ) It's been updated to use the 3.62 and 3.70 hacks. Changelog excerpt... 0.1 -> 0.2 01/31/2006 -Ported code from Ops for mass storage support in 3.62 and 3.70 camcorders. These cams still need to be prepped once by running mass storage enabling scripts from Ops.