czwartek, 17 stycznia 2013

Car PC, vintage style, part 1.

Recently I have bough, out of curiosity, something called "bordcomputer küpper weisser infotech" - whatever it migh mean, it was sold as a scrap, rather than tested and working device. I bought it mainly because it has an VGA port, so I guessed it also might have an real PC inside. This is how it looks from the outside:












So, the first thing to do, as a reverse engineer, I had to do was to open it, and see whats 's inside. I was kinda lucky, as the stuff inside was the stuff I wanted to be inside. What I have found and identified:


Smart486PC from Digital-Logic is the main part of this PC. This is the actual PC here. Fortunately I found a manual for that system-on-chip. Above that you can see a GPS module and on the right there is a 3V Lithium accumulator and a Disk-on-Chip with 8 MB of space. On the left from the smart486PC module there is an PC/104-shaped connector, that probably IS an PC/104, why not.

Such a setup means that this could be perhaps used as an PC. Regular, DOS-Compatible PC. The plan is to  power this thing up and see what happens next. If it will show some kind of normal startup  then the next step is to try to put something more generic on the Disk-on-chip. How? No idea, although the BPC is equipped with DoC socket. Then - deassemble everything that is in the firmware of this device and try to write own firmware. 

3 komentarze:

  1. Do you still have the user manual? I have the same module here but no info in it.

    Thanks

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    1. The smartModule manual is on the web - http://lhcb-online.web.cern.ch/ecs/ccpc/docs/SM586PC_V101.pdf

      For sure I have the manuals somwhere... I will look for it ASAP, but it migt take few weeks, as this was like three computers ago ;).

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  2. Thank you so much! That already contains everything i need to know.

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