The Pidrive has been somewhat of a pipe-dream for me for years - and actually I've been working on it since the Pi's release in February 2012. I have always wanted to build a computer inside a CD drive. I'd browse mini-itx.com and drool over all the case mods, but I never had enough money to make one.

Enter the Raspberry-Pi: a small enough, cheap enough board for me to finally do it with! So, the Pidrive is a computer in a CD drive. It currently plays music via mpd, though there's still a bit of space inside and "it's a linux box" so it can do a lot more. Some things I'd like to add:

• Home automation (it's low power, so always-on is an option)
• Alarm clock, including lights on, kettle on, curtains open etc. See above.
• Playlist sync between all my devices
• Home gateway - it was working as this for a while, see Poor man's Ultrabook

The block diagram shows the system architecture. At the heart is a Pi (a Rev 1.0 model B - I got up early on release day to order it and everything). This has a low-level interface board connected to the i2c bus, which consists of a Atmega168 and some driver circuitry for the LCD and LEDs. There's a 101x40 monochrome LCD also on the i2c bus, and some push-buttons and a scroll wheel attached to the Atmega. Finally, there is a USB<->SATA converter attached to a 2.5" HDD.

On to hardware ⇒