PCMCIA ATA Controller Emulation

[Dominik Brodowski]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 11:37:19PM +0100, Richard Smith wrote:
> I'm posting this here in the vague hope that someone can give me a 
> hint/help with a little project I'm researching.
> 
> Ok, some background first. I work for a company that supplies network 
> solutions and stuff for the marine environment. I've been asked if it is 
> possible to interface our black box of tricks which is an embedded PC, 
> to a piece of hardware via it's compact flash interface.
> 
> The premise is that the hardware we're connecting to thinks that our 
> embedded PC is actually a compact flash card and uses us as it's storage 
> for it's logs and other stuff that we need.

I'm lost. Fortunately not somewhere out in the ocean, but maybe you can help
me nonetheless:

 ----------------------------
| Your embedded PC with lots |
|  of fancy proprietary      |
|         software  == A     |
|--------------              |
|     (1)      |             |
 ----------------------------
       |
       |
 ----------------------------
|    (2)      |              |
---------------              |
|      Other hardware  == B  |
 ----------------------------

What is (1), and what is (2)?

[ ] Compact Flash Interface
[ ] Hardware necessary to emulate a CF device

And would A's logs be magically be available on the emulated CF device? And
be accessed by the "other hardware", i.e. B? Or the other way round?

> The advantage for us is that we can remotely support the device in 
> question and also finally deploy our superdupermegawotchamacallit 
> proprietary thing, which up until now we've not been able to do since 
> someone can come along swipe the flash card, and bob's your uncle, 
> fanny's your aunt our hundreds of hours of toil and labour go down the 
> drain.

Well, if it emulates to be a CF device, why couldn't someone else access it
_as_ a CF device and copy the contents?

	Dominik