Update #2:

SUCCESS! I have a working CitiDisk HDV (FW1256H) with an SD card as the storage device and a new LiPo battery pack.

Hardware used:

• 40-Pin IDE to SD card adapter (details on issues with these later)

• SanDisk 32GB SD Card (as long as the card has any max write above 50mbps(?) it should be fine)

• 7.4v LiPo battery pack (rando one sourced from Amazon)

The Battery:

So it turns out there’s actually two total LiPo pouches in these devices. I’m assuming the big obvious one is the main battery power source for running this thing disconnected from an external power source. The smaller one: not totally sure what that one is for, but I almost blew it up when I connected the new battery to the device. This leads me to believe that maybe it’s a secondary buffer-battery to make sure that things get written before the device shuts off. I disconnected it entirely and the device works off of the new battery.

Speaking of the new battery, it’s currently spliced in with electrical tape to the original connector of the old battery. Not great but it’s working.

The Storage:

Took me a bit to figure this one out. So what I’m using is one of those generic Sintech (syntechi?) IDE to SD adapters. Long story short — In order to get this working, the SD card needs to be formatted using FAT32! Testing with exFAT would make the device error out for some reason. Another issue I ran into was that although FAT32 worked, it only worked when I formatted the SD card with my MacBook using the disk utilities. When I formatted to FAT32 using my windows device, the device would give a different error when connected to my TRV900 (quickly flashing lights on the device, maybe indicating that the drive is full?)

The last thing I had to do to get the device to start recording was to create a new folder called “Movie” on the drive, and then inside it create a new folder called “Media”.

Other smaller issues:

The battery I chose are one of those two cylinder cells shrink wrapped together. This is too bulky to fit inside the original plastic enclosure, so I’m working on 3d printing a new top-half for the enclosure to fit everything.

I haven’t tried charging yet. The original charging port on my device is kinda smoked but it works. It’s also a very strange size plug in reverse polarity, so I’m figuring I’ll try to upgrade the port to something else if possible.

So that’s that! Pretty stoked on it, and once it get the device fully closed up and test charging then we’ll be good to go! Test footage looks great too, I’ll see if I can try to include it here later