Generally, everyone is found of DVD boxed sets covering most of the shelves of our house. The ripping of the discs to a media server is a slow process and tedious one because every hour you need to feed the computer another disc which is disruptive to normal life. If you are stuck with the same problem, then here is your weapon. Jack the DVD ripper which is equipped with a 3D printer, raspberry powered device that is designed in a way that pulls a DVD from a stack, put it into a drive and after ripping, put it back to the pile. Isn’t this a life and time saver? The best part of this project is that it is automatic and doesn’t require your much needed attention. It means that you can do whatever you want to do while ripping is performed.

 

 

Andy Ayre decided to build a robot to perform the disc changing and divided the description of Jack into five parts: introduction, mechanics, electronics, software and troubleshooting. You can visit his site for detailed information. His aim were to make a modular software and hardware design that has an open source and is reliable in nature accompanied with low cost by using off-the-shelf electronics

 

To be very precise, a stack of discs are placed into the “in tray”. While an arm moves over to the stack of discs and grabs the top disc. Then the disc is lowered into the drive tray and is ripped apart. Once the ripping is complete, the disc is removed from the drive tray and the arm takes it over to the “out tray” and places it there. It is a Raspberry Pi enabled machine which is used to control the robot. A PC is also used to control the overall process and the ripping.

 

You can use your old laptop that can rip a DVD. The in tray used in the project is designed to hold 24 discs to give about 28 hours of ripping time. You can work on increasing the capacity of the in tray and the out tray if your PC is faster. All the materials required and description including software and part source files and STLs can be found on github. The files are licensed under GPLv3.

 

You will love to play with this project including 3D printing and other motors and it will save your time too. Good luck