SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Retrofitting a Motorola MDT-9100T "Mobile Data Terminal" with a BeagleBone Black
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 13 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(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.