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Trammell Hudson has written a blog post about his project to retro fit a Motorola MDT-9100T "Mobile Data Terminal" from eBay with a BeagleBone Black running a modern operating system. He figues their retro-future design was too neat to pass up and that the stylish housing combined with an aperture-less amber CRT looks like something slipped from the Fallout or BladeRunner universe into our own. So he and some others at NYC Resistor bought a few and are repurposing them. A lot of soldering and cable smithing is involved.
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Retrofitting a Motorola MDT-9100T "Mobile Data Terminal" with a BeagleBone Black
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(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:52PM (6 children)
I remember seeing the terminals inside squad cars and thinking how awesome they looked. A cool bit of pre-toughbook laptop technology. I wonder how much life they'll get before dying.
Nice post, thanks for sharing.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:55PM (2 children)
So long as the CRT doesn't lose its vacuum or filament then it should last quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday August 08 2018, @05:06PM (1 child)
I remember CRTs from that era had nasty problems with burn in. That particular CRT didn't seem to show it though.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:19PM
I wonder if it has to do with the type of phosphor and beam current required for that particular brightness.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday August 08 2018, @05:30PM
If taken care of, it will outlast you next dozen toy cell phones. :P
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:30AM
He should have sniffed the radio i/f before upgrading.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:38AM
The things ran for years in the harsh environment of a police cruiser. Now it is a show piece that will be powered up occasionally to show it off. Doubt the guy who made it is going to be using a BeagleBone with a B&W display as their primary workstation. Odds are it will hold out a few more years in that service before something dies of age that a replacement can't be found for. But that keyboard does look pretty frickin' sweet, bet it would be fun to type on. Again, it was built to withstand years of service in an unforgiving environment and it predates Apple's gimped keyboard fad.