Car PC, vintage style, part 3

So I have started debugging the Car PCs software and getting really into programming on that thing. I have divided the work into several 'modules' so I can gather information about one specific part of the device, independent of the rest.

1. Keypad:
Fairly simple, or event very simple. You can program it to output any character you want to using some dedicated software that I do not have. Currently the arrow keys on the front-panel go a b c d and enter is just enter.

2. LCD:
Quite easy. There are two ways of using the character LCD on the front panel: with or without drivers. If one  wants to do everything manually Data bus is under 0A9h indexed through port 22h and the control  bus is under 0A8h indexed through port 22h. Also there is a *.COM driver that allows to remap the first four lines to the LCD. The driverless version of LCD control seems nicer to me, as long as the LCD used in the PC is a HD44780 compatible.

3. GPS:
Harder. Now I know only that the GPS is residing at COM1 interface. I hope this is a fairly standard COMport GPS device and will work with nearly standard communication protocol.

4. I/O:
There is a CAN interface, Analog in and Digital in/out. Still no clues how to get to that.

5. Front panel connector:
Localized and nearly ordered.

6. Sound card:
probably there is one.

That's all for now I guess.

Car PC, vintage style, part 2

So I have managed to run this piece of hardware. It powers up when 12 V is applied to some pins of the back connector:

So this means that this hardware is worth the work I will put into it. After double checking if everything that I was able to check is alive (LCD, VGA out, keypad) I removed the flash disc (8 MB Disk-on-Chip), and carefully placed it in the Geode PC (as it is my only running PC with DoC slot). Geode booted from the DoC, as it has no operting system at the moment. It seems that this PC is running a normal MS-DOS - yay! On the DoC I have found also some applications for this system - this will be disassembled soon. Also this means that I will have to put the Geode in working condition - put an HDD inside (there is a 20 GB HDD waiting) and install MS-DOS or something compatible, together with an C compiler, disassembler and what not.

Second thing I have noted is the connector for the Car PC:

This connector has COM, VGA and most important a Keyboard signals inside. The last thing is quite crucial at the moment I guess. It will allow me to install a normal MS-DOS on the DoC and add some hardware sniffing and testing programs. This is a must if I want to use it (and I do).

So - things to do:

1. Finish working on the Geode (HDD, OS - MS-DOS, software).
2. Get the round 19 pin connector for the front-panel of the Car PC.

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.