Motorola Car Computer (Mobile Data Terminal 9100)

[Moondog]

Clearly, you need to purchase a vintage Crown Vic for your computer...

I was thinking a mid-80's Plymouth Grand Fury would be a great host. A former co-worker bought his at a police auction and thought it was the best built car he ever owned.

 

[NeXT]

Welp.
Seller said he had two more and I cut a deal to pay for and have them shipped. I *specifically* sent a message with the (paypal) payment to pack them a lot better than the first unit.

Nope. Total loss.

Shattered plastics (they look okay in the pic above but almost every corner is caved in), keystems snapped off and it looks to be both CRT's are necked. Don't mind the dirt as that was already agreed that they would not be mint but christ, I paid $160 in shipping and EXPECTED it to be packed better than this. I need a drink before I wander off to file a claim.

 

[Slob]

This is sickening to see.

I have an HP2644 terminal and I got this 30 pound object in a box 20% too big with one (1) layer of SMALL bubble wrap mostly around it. The thing actually worked but it looked like it took a ride in a washing machine.

I obsessed over this and managed to fix it with auto body shop products to the point where I even duplicated the beige spatter paint.

 

[NeXT]

BuMP.

I've been stalled on this project for years now. After rebuilding two systems back to a working state I sold two others off and got the vehicle prewired for both GPS and DC power. The plan of action remains to use it partially as a navigation system (did you know there exists mapping software for Windows 3.1 that supports GPS functionality? That must of been expensive when new!) and terminal over wi-fi. There's a pile of assorted framing bits and pieces to make this possible but I've been incredibly stubborn on figuring out how the heck toe flashing utility for the SSD works so I can just reload the MDT with MS-DOS, card services, SCSI drivers and then just point the rest at a CF card in one of the two PCMCIA slots. (@Chartreuse gave me pointers and a writeup on this and I'll admit I've done nothing with them....)
There appears to be no official documentation from Motorola. There's still some speculation on the ports underneath.

What has surfaced was at least one version of a disk image from an MDT - https://archive.org/details/MotorolaMdt9100386Flash
....and the breakdown of some of the files you find, courtesy of Chartreuse - http://retro.ckits.ca/mdt9100/index.html
More technical info here - http://www.batlabs.com/mdt.html

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Glad you're still working on this. That is an absolutely neat little machine.

 

[Al Kossow]

I collected some information on the earlier KDT-480 a while ago along with some floppies
I still have a bunch of service manuals to scan. These are non-PC based devices

Index of /communications/motorola/KDT-480

 

[NeXT]

Yeah the earlier MDT and the KDT's are their own thing which them a lot less usable for much beyond a static prop unless you want to get your hands dirty. It was the -386 denotation that really gives away that inside there's been a redesign but that was very late in the life of the MDT's so I've heard.

 

[Al Kossow]

The back-end documentation and patents are the interesting part of what I turned up, ie. how the systems were actually used.
The insides are pretty meh.. just radio modems and 6809 based terminals.