Tnkgrl has come up with a totally awesome hack that is totally accomplishable by anyone with a bit of patience, a steady hand and some minor soldering skills. The Mac Book Air super drive is a reasonably priced piece of hardware and it looks good. Why shouldn’t you want to use it on a real computer.

Tnkgrl was puzzled as to why the drive wouldn’t work elsewhere and deduced that it must be down to the IDE to USB bridge and some custom firmware. A hardware hack involving a $9.00 part was needed to overcome this.

To get the MBA super drive working, you are going to need a Slim Line CD to USB Adapter. According to Tnkgrl:

The part is small enough to fit within the MBA SuperDrive, but requires removal of the daughter-board (containing a power connector, a USB connector, and several capacitors), as well as the non-ideal relocation of the 12 MHz crystal.

Check out the Tnkgrl Blog and her Flickr series for more information about how this works. [Tnkgrl via Make]

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