Little Guys 7: The Cop-puter [Motorola MW800]

I'd much rather this have been used in an ambulance, but what can you do.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:07 External overview
11:05 Peripherals
15:22 Firmware and software
17:48 Hardware specs
20:11 Video capture tests
24:10 Hard drive caddy internals
34:18 Cooling
35:52 Opening it up
38:25 Video capture & output board
44:01 Mezzanine module
46:01 Motherboard analysis
48:29 Everything goes wrong at once / Soba
49:17 Further thoughts on cooling
53:41 Conclusions
55:14 Outro

[@CathodeRayDude]

Oh you know what, it doesn't have an SSD because of the video recorder. Without that, it wouldn't need much more than a 16gb EMMC, but video tears it. Performant SSDs at the time weren't very big, cost a fortune and couldn't tolerate a ton of writes, so an HDD made a lot more sense for continuous video capture.

[@Natsumidragneelkim]

My jurisdiction they were and still are mounted in the trunk of cars and SUVs behind the backseat in the trucks

[@thesmashtvnetwork]

​@@Natsumidragneelkim as a truck drive i hate this thing it sucks

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

Don't feel too bad about the trunk stuff , some certainly do/did have another machine in the rear and then there's always csi , marine police , etc etc. All would see the same machines advertised in the yearly convention. Love the oddities of this series , the lesser and lesser known devices if you aren't in that field or line of work/sales.

[@alexenochss]

not trying to be an asshole by saying this ..{im far from one been a fan of the channel for quite some time} but how did you not realize this doesnt go in the trunk after giving the whole shpeal about the custom cables only being for the particular device.. then hooking all of the said custom cables up to said device.. and seeing they dont even reach 5 feet long then again..ive been super excited about some things in the past and something obvious has flown over my head so i get it .. xD just wanted to point this out thanks for awesome vids!

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@alexenochss see the whole thing I've been trying to establish with this series is that I'm not very good at getting things right on the first try lmao

[@jeremyzeimet3631]

My life was better not knowing about screw in USB, now I'll just be mad at regular USB plugs.

[@fisqual]

I've bemoaned the lack of screws on USB ports since they came out.

[@matwyder4187]

I can count on one hand the times this was an issue for me. On the other hand, the one with slightly more fingers, plugging in USB? A torture every single fkin time. Making it even more finicky, makes a lot of sense. To be fair, in a car, absolutely legit.

[@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket]

@@matwyder4187 When it comes to motherboards the bottom of the motherboard should be parallel with the plastic part of the USB. If you do this you will get it in perfectly the first time every time on a PC. Now TV's, printers, etc? They do their own thing and march the drum of their own beat.

[@matwyder4187]

@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket Do you have any idea how many flat plastic surfaces are on an average USB plug? Parallel with which? Not to mention motherboards that have no declared top and bottom sides, and you only figure it out after taking the gizmo apart. Trust me, it's a nightmare.

[@CoreDreamStudios]

POS systems NEED these. I used to service them and half the time the cashiers would unplug USB cables going to card readers or printers and didn't know what they did.

[@oliverer3]

Props to Conexant for actually writing what the chip does on the chip. Wish that was more common to more easily orient yourself on a board without looking up 10 datasheets from the get-go.

[@CathodeRayDude]

right??? silkscreen is free, what are they afraid of!

[@ruddygreat4914]

Imagining a screw-in usb-c connector on the bottom of a phone and smiling serenely

[@meatbyproducts]

Saw it on a rugged phone that had FLIR built in and a giant battery built in. Sadly, the next release of the phone ditched it.

[@beefax]

you'd probably see that in one of those display phones you'd see at tech shops

[@user-wd9uz1ng4p]

You can find those in the industrial cameras and similar computer vision sensors

[@xWood4000]

I'd love to have screw in USB C on my mirrorless camera, so that I can use SSDs instead of SD cards and still be sure that it works. Actually I'd like all ports except the 3.5mm ports to be many USB C ports on it, as long as HDMI and the trigger latency isn't too bad via USB C

[@meatbyproducts]

@xWood4000 oh man that would rock. We get half assed clamp things, but they don't work. I have worked with some box cameras that have OTHER ports that can screw in, but never USB. At least none that I have worked with.

[@XanthinZarda]

Imagine having your recording session disturbed by such a vile force of darkness, a being of pure static...and fluff!

[@Amphobet]

Most replayed section of the video. 😹

[@aaronkoch3273]

27:30 the extra mass doesn't reduce vibration, it lowers the frequency of the vibration.

[@alakani]

Which also more importantly lowers the slew rate, spreading out sharp peaks over time

[@markjames8664]

This is like a car suspension, where most of the mass is on the top of the springs-contrasted with an old spring mounted buggy seat (this example is from a high school physics book and for some reason I still remember it). I think the two materials around the mounting bolts work like a spring/shock combo on a car.

[@modernsolutions6631]

reduce vibrations is a word without a physical definition (unlike dampen vibrations). I find the word use while technically ill-defined entirely appropriate. Edit: Actually they say dampen. Saying dampen is technically incorrect, saying reduce isn't.

[@thomasphillips885]

Yeah more mass means more inertia, dampening vibrations

[@uploadJ]

Those four blue mounts - look like aircraft 'radio' equipment mounts, as aircraft can have a lot of repetitive engine vibration rendered throughout the airframe ... those mounts come in much larger forms, too. Like the size of doorknobs.

[@TooLazyToFail]

I was a Bacon-American for about two years during this period, and I agree probably 98% with you regarding American policing. I've come a long way since then. Thanks for covering the tech: it's not good or evil, it just is. Our computers were in the trunk and were notoriously unreliable. I had a bonkers freeway chase of a murder suspect at the governed speed of 128 MPH that was recorded by the system as a big black box. I'm sure it's way better now, which... all I can say is that I think more recording of police activities can't be anything but a positive. These folks have tremendous power and should face tremendous scrutiny. At the time I was an early adopter, voluntarily, of newly-cheap pen-cams and bodycam recorders, which I self-bought. They saved me from more than one accusation of misbehavior. My peers were so uncomfortable with me wearing them that I definitely should have taken that as a sign of poor culture-fit. Thanks for your channel. I'm a Patron because I know how it feels to step out on a limb. I did so to get out of police work. It was the right call. I'm still recovering in so many ways.

[@spokehedz]

I can confirm that there are specific hard drives that are "sealed/floating in a ballistics goop" because I had to clean lots of them up, to destroy/erase the data on them. The weird connector on the end that translated the S/PATA or whatever it was, we didn't have. So it was me, a Torx security bit screwdriver set that had no idea it was destined for this terrible fate, and a whole lot of gloves and "Goof Off" which is that Xylene-based cleaner that "Goo-Gone" hopes to grow up into some day. UGH. And the worst was, it was some kind of extremely specific drive variant (that was just a regular hard drive that they 'tested' I would bet money) that NOBODY ever bought. I watched those things sit in inventory as I pulled parts from inventory to fill orders, and then I would check in all 50+ of them when physical inventory happened every year. It was like a weird stockholm/groundhog day situation. I don't actually know what those drives came out of, but I do remember that some of them were quite beaten up. Sand/dirt/scrapes that were a bit more out of the "normal removable drive" wear. And no, I didn't ever look at the drive contents. I think at the time we were just going into some war in some sandy places... Hmm. Maybe I don't want to think about this anymore.

[@Lurch-Bot]

You were destroying HDDs with military data. And you really shouldn't think about it too much.

[@RubyRoks]

Been a while since i'd seen one of these. My dad's a 911 systems installer by trade. He'd designed and built my home county's 911 dispatch center when i was a kid (my brother got to help lol) and he'd always end up with almost literal tons of Motorola boxes, usually radios but sometimes computers including these, at home to fiddle with off the clock to keep things running.

[@strawmanfallacy]

Dude.... I really love this series. I wanted to do something like this for a long time but you're giving it the treatment it deserves and I never could. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Your content is something that truly brings me joy.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I'm so glad to hear that, I know exactly what you mean. I felt like this whole segment was underserved and I figured other people were probably just curious as me!

[@Seansmit23]

The cat is not an interruption.. it's why I'm here 😂

[@uploadJ]

Cool cat. Very cool.

[@Dong_Harvey]

He even talks

[@lezzbmm]

49:00 kittyy !!!! “surprise inspection” lmao

[@LARKXHIN]

"you are made of static" lol

[@ve4edj]

That mysterious COM port is likely the GPS.

[@coyote_den]

There would be a few of them. GPS, and also the WWAN baseband. Believe it or not, they use Hayes-like AT commands for everything. Even the baseband in a smartphone does, it's just a type of modem.

[@jfbeam]

@@coyote_den Exactly. There will be the obvious (external) serial ports, then the less obvious (pin headers), and then the "WTF is this" emulated serial devices like the GPS, WWAN, bluetooth, radio, video codex, lightbar... One of the boxes I messed with (DoD contractor "embedded server" has 2 external ports, but the BIOS says there are 8 total COM's.)

[@xeneomorph]

It is, I own a former cop car and tell you it has GPS in the back, that attaches to the front.

[@Lurch-Bot]

There is literally a coax connector that is labeled 'GPS'🤦‍♂

[@mamaharumi]

I never knew that cop cars used anything other than rugged laptops. Interesting.

[@zlcoolboy]

Yeah, really should just be a laptop as you can take a laptop inside when doing paperwork.

[@abcdef20]

Thats one way to do it but then you need a separate video recorder and possibly a dedicated radio interface. The benefit of using a laptop is that the user can remove it and use it at a desk or whatever. The user would need another computer (although much cheaper) to use at their desk. Having everything all in one could simplify procurement and better integrate Motorola radios with the Motorola carputer. I'm sure Motorola sold the complete package of a radio, antennas, dashcam, and the computer.

[@ComradeRachel]

I think many did. I guess this was another option but I do feel like the toughbooks were more popular of an option.

[@DigitalJedi]

I think the toughbooks may have been what largely replaced these. I've never worked with police gear, but every toughbook I've seen is a bit newer than these. Like a few years into windows 7.

[@jfbeam]

@@DigitalJedi I was about to say the same. This "little guy" is quite old. The local police all had toughbooks - several generations, in fact. (I was at a junk reseller who had a literal pallet of old toughbooks from the detective's division. Standard pallet, stack was over 3ft high.) I have a more modern "toughbook" from a sub-sub-contractor (DoD)... but it's entirely plastic, so I don't know why they even bother calling it a toughbook. I also have a new Dell rugged extreme laptop/tablet (removable keyboard), and it's 10,000x tougher than that plastic toughbook. (Those toughbooks all ran XP, btw. Even the one I have.)

[@jp-ny2pd]

I'm guessing the mystery plugs were for monitoring the vehicle stats (Speed, brakes, sirens, etc) and for aux IO for integrating with other devices. The weight on the hard-drive is to lower it's resonant frequency. So for example, instead of it vibrating at 20Hz, it now vibrates at 2Hz. The heavier something is, the more energy it takes to move it. So for any fixed amount of energy input, like vibration from a car, the resulting motion will be less if one item is heavier then another. This weight would also be tuned with the dampers to specifically target what the car gives you in most cases. Isolating the hard-drive is probably one of the most mechanically challenging jobs on this whole design. It would make sense that if they had a known good dampening system, but the connector was on the wrong side, to just bend the cable. I'd guess that a big company like Motorola could easily spend millions qualifying a green-field design every time they needed to roll out a new version of these. Far most cost-effective to just use a known design with minimal changes.

[@cmsch180]

The AUX io was for the speed,brakes, etc.. (small black module on top of the computer on the picture he found) that other weird 4 port thing he showed is for ALPRS.. License plate recognition Cameras and neither of his computers had the module for that

[@markarca6360]

Telematics, everyone?

[@Lurch-Bot]

see: 'moment of inertia', lol. also, I wouldn't be saying too much in favor of Motorola because they're the idiots who designed the whole thing to be powered by a 12V automotive pigtail connector. That says that they didn't know what they were doing. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Seagate actually designed the drive isolation mount, along with hacking the drive to respond to shock thermal loads by modulating drive speed according to thermal load. Normally HDDs just shut down when they overtemp but when the system is recording the evidence they need for a conviction, it is preferrable to reduce drive speed (and, consequently, video bitrate) rather than having the system shut down completely. IDK if you noticed because of the schlock editing job and lazy re-shoots but those were thermistors on the spindle and head pivot, not heaters as he originally thought. And thin film thermistors that elaborate can rapidly detect the sort of shock thermal loads that would be applied to a mini PC bolted to the transmission tunnel of a cop car where the cop just stomped on the gas to go after someone doing 120mph down the freeway. Yes, the resistance changes were small, because they are being measured by an IC that can detect milliohms worth of resistance variance. Also, the calculation he applied to determine power output if it were a heating coil is way more power than would ever be needed to prevent too-low operating temps. Pushing that kind of power through those coils would make for a nice fire starter.

[@Col_Crunch]

2:00 Ambulances and fire trucks would generally use the same equipment. In a lot of local and county level governments their emergency management departments handle the acquisition and management of communications equipment for agencies within their jurisdictions. So the local fire department ,EMS service (if a separately organized agency exists for EMS in the jurisdiction), police and/or sheriff would all have the same equipment for their CAD systems. Its not that way everywhere, but a lot of places work like that.

[@Yixdy]

Aren't all EMS services privately owned and operated? So you're telling me the gov't in some places is paying for PC equipment for privately owned ambulances?

[@Col_Crunch]

@@Yixdy in most places in the US EMS services are handled by the local fire department. However some places remove the medics, ambulances, etc, from the fire departments and move them to their own agency. Boston EMS is a good example. There are ofc private providers as well, however they aren’t the majority in most places.

[@XanthinZarda]

@@Yixdy Naw. Many of them are proper state agencies.

[@markjames8664]

Even if the ambulances are private they still need to talk to 911, so they need similar radio equipment and computer interfacing.

[@Col_Crunch]

@@markjames8664 most private companies do their own dispatching, so 911 contacts the company who then dispatches the ambulance rather than 911 dispatching them directly. I am sure there are some exceptions to that though, and they would def be using similar equipment regardless.

[@jamesgates1074]

We need a series where you go over all the skews of Windows from 95 to 11 and get progressively more angry 😂

[@Roxor128]

At least all the variants of Linux are justified by them being made by different teams with different goals. You can't say the same about Windows.

[@pr0ntab]

By the way, it's SKU, not skew. StocK Unit, which basically means the barcode number on a boxed item in a store. Skew is like when you slant something to one side.

[@g.u.959]

@@pr0ntabI mean, they’re pronounced the same, we all knew what they meant, so. Also it’s Stock Keeping Unit I believe

[@papeleradereciclaje4375]

Oddly enough, I don't think 95 had different SKUs. But it a had a lot of small little updates that were released over time.

[@unicodefox]

Also, the windows vista sticker is just. Off. It's got the XP logo and it's in Arial.

[@christianstarling3710]

That's the Vista "compatible" badge, basically means its just barely capable of Vista basic but would be best to run XP on it.

[@linuxuser2064]

​@@christianstarling3710As far as I know, the Vista compatible sticker was like: "Designed for Windows XP" And at the bottom "Vista compatible" I may be wrong though.

[@christianstarling3710]

@@linuxuser2064 upon second look it's not the Vista compatible badge, it's the Vista basic badge. Basically the same thing though.

[@prodbyfaith]

The original Vista basic logo has round top and bottom, a smaller Windows logo and all white text on grey background. Windows XP's was rectangular with black text on white background. That's just a fake sticker that borrows elements from both.

[@VulpesHilarianus]

@@prodbyfaith Even the XP badges had rounded corners, and both they, the Vista Basic, and the "Designed For Windows XP - Windows Vista Compatible" badges were never grey and black. They were metallic silver and black. Windows Vista Home, Premium, and all others above that were either white or green with the blue roundel. So it's the real badge layout, but a recreation printed out onto a sticker sheet. Really odd regardless.

[@cmsch180]

@cathodeRayDude the mystery module at 44:37 is a "dead Reckoning" board for the GPS tracking. basically an array of accelerometers to try and keep vehicle location if GPS signal is lost. The reason its on the top like that is because its orientation needs to be changed depending on the orientation of the computer itself.

[@Zagill]

Remember folks, it's not distracted driving if you're a cop zoned in on your coptop

[@MegaZeta]

And playing on your phone? That's "on patrol"

[@Mike2321x]

So the laptops talk when they receive data from the dispatch server. It’s all text to speech now. Found that out when I got cut off and in a pretty bad wreck. They had me sitting in the front passenger seat since it was cold out.

[@Yixdy]

I've seen em typing with BOTH HANDS while going over 40 mph!

[@Yixdy]

​@@Mike2321xmaybe *some* of them have the *option* to turn text to speech on, but I doubt it's very common place, or even commonly used

[@Nukle0n]

Patrolling around Coppadocia.

[@TailRecursion]

I had some computers with Vista Home Basic when I was younger. As far as I recall, it was a SKU for cheaper/low-end machines (mainly laptops) and was missing certain aesthetic and media features like Aero, WMC and Flip 3D. I remember being really excited to get a "fancy new laptop running Vista" in middle school, only to immediately be crushed by the absence of Flip 3D. Absolutely tragic.

[@Yandarval]

Without looking stuff up. I think Basic had a 2GB RAM limit. As well as a restriction on the HDD size. I "think" Basic was sort of forced on MS. Who remembers the laptops that could barely run Vista. Due to Intel and other manufacturers, cheaping out on hardware and poor drivers. I vaguely recall the Vista Beta builds running ok on T42/43 and T60 Thinkpads. When new "Vista Capable" stickered machines started appearing on new machines. Said machines where terrible. Now "Vista Ready" were the machines that actually ran Vista well. However, normal people back then did not shell out the 800+ to get into the bottom tier "Ready" bracket. A decade and a half later. OEMs are still pushing these low spec machines for W11. 4GB of RAM is the 512/1GB of yeteryear. Stick any Chromium based browser on, then 8GB can feel tight.

[@dylon4906]

yep, my grandparents had a lower end Compaq desktop with vista home basic. as a kid I was also disappointed with its lack of aero and stuff because I thought aero was so cool at the time

[@Fay7666]

I had basically the same, Inspiron 1525 with Vista Home Basic as well as MediaDirect, which I hated because I saw it as an excuse to not give me Media Center which I wanted to try with my Xbox.

[@lasskinn474]

@@Yandarval basic supposed to have 8 gigs limit I think? in a 64bit system. 32bit system 3.5. but hey at least it's not the Starter that has a limit of 3 applications running at the same time or something.

[@Dong_Harvey]

​@lasskinn474 Windows Vista Boomer only live streams Fox News. Only legal in contiguous US

[@SaranWrap]

As an installer of emergency and police equipment, I haven't seen one of these. I've only ever seen/installed cradles for actual laptops, so it was really cool to know there are mini PCs that have been designed and manufactured for such cases. Also funny to share your opinions on said products. I wish I did more Fire/EMS but alas, police is just needy and funded better.

[@Yixdy]

*Sigh,* can't we just take half of their extremely over inflated budget and get a state run EMS service instead of those privately owned jagoffs?

[@daer2121]

​@@Yixdybe like where I am: don't fund either! Be at your shooting in 4 hours or less or your ambulance ride is free.

[@henryatkinson1479]

That power supply is an original Motorola unit - I have one new in a Motorola-branded box and use it when programming mobile radios on the bench before deployment. EDIT: There seems to be a lot of over-criticality here... the cable for the caddy isn't a "bodge," its pretty clearly bespoke. Its not getting creased, and you can even see that when you re-attach the connector, it has a bunch of slack in it. Also, by mounting the fans how they did, you get more usable radiator surface area. If you want to have a boss with a tapped hole in that aluminum, you're going to need a thicker wall than just casting a dowel over-top of a fin.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I've seen plenty of folded over mylar cables before, but what's the explanation for the foam rubber foot between the layers? That's what makes it feel like a bodge to me, the cable doesn't sit flat on it and the foot is jammed into the edge of it. There's no way they designed it that way on purpose.

[@nickwallette6201]

Heater weirdness: This makes sense. It's a lot of power because it can bring the enclosure to temperature quickly, even if it's a metal sled in a metal case with lots of thermal mass. From then on, you can just pulse it on from time to time. The foam is likely there to compress the heater closer to the surface that needs to be heated. A heater hanging out in free space doesn't work as effectively. Turn on a heated blanket and hold it out in front of you. Touch it after a minute or so and see how warm the blanket feels to you. Now sit on it and repeat the experiment. HeatSINK weirdness: The rubber nubs on the fans, that slide on to the guideposts -- that's for vibration damping. Not to protect the fans from the environment, but to lessen the racket they create. A quiet fan is always appreciated, even in a car. "Why only this little spot?" I didn't catch how all the thermals conduct, but I would guess the enclosure does a lot of the work of bringing heat to that area, and then that area is actively cooled if/when needed. MOST of the time, the case can probably shed quite a bit of the heat generated inside. And when it's not enough, the fans cool the fins, which conduct from the case, which conducts from all the stuff inside. AV Decoder: This is a really common term for composite video interfaces. It takes a bit of work to turn that smooshed h-sync, v-sync, luminance, and chroma signal into a bitmap in a frame buffer. Especially the color carrier, which is known as "decoding color." So yes, "decoder" is what you would search for if you were looking for an IC to do this. (Not so much in the vernacular for a video capture _solution,_ which would have the decoder IC embedded as part of it.) BTW, I would pronounce it "Connects-'nt" with more of an ambiguous e/uh sound, rather than "Connects-Ant". I don't know if that's official, but it's my take. SDVO: I knew these as "ADD Cards" -- an acronym for "AGP Digital Display". I had an old micro-ATX Pentium 4 board that had integrated graphics and a VGA port on the board, but no DVI, and I wanted a digital output. So I had to track down the exceedingly hard-to-find ADD Card to add (no pun intended) the DVI port. That's all it did -- no brains of its own, just a DVI driver chip and a port. The vendor wanted something like $80 to ship the $15 card to my address, so I had to have someone else mail it to me. I've always thought it weird how these are mounted in a car. Like, do they _really_ need to be up there in the console like that? The LCD and keyboard, sure, but the whole PC? Why ISN'T that in the trunk? Or at least built in under the arm rest or something. THAT seems janky. Even if there needed to be a media card reader in the monitor or in the dash somewhere. At least it would be less crowded.

[@villesyrjala3354]

The SDVO/PCIe cards are properly called ADD2. ADD was the earlier DVO/AGP variant.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@villesyrjala3354 OH. Well, TIL. Thank you.

[@lachlanlau]

this guys smart

[@Flimzes]

"Why ISN'T that in the trunk? " Two immediate thoughts 1. The trunk is already modified and filled with weapons storage and other fun stuff. 2. Signal quality in a high noise environment, especially for video. Long distance video in high RF was probably bulkier and more expensive, not to mention that any kind of car harness would need to be longer than the USB standard permits, requiring active repeaters along the way.

[@snoopdogie187]

@@Flimzes Also, dont forget, inside the cabin, it is heated and cooled while this computer is doing most of its hardest work. Then you also have the constraint that the backseat is 100% off limits, so its either the engine compartment, truck, or somewhere in the front half of the cabin.

[@Igorooooleynikov]

You are missing out on military equipment, it is very interesting topic. They use unique stuff, although it is hard to get hands on it for a review.

[@mosh.4245]

He won't, He comes off as a "the Milltary is bad because they shoot people" type.

[@AureliusR]

I don't think you quite understood why he is reluctant to review/touch that stuff.

[@Igorooooleynikov]

@@AureliusR I know why, but reasoning is still super lame. Military tech is insane and kind of funny in some ways. Especially now when it is possible to assemble FPV drone with stuff from aliexpress and stuff you probably can legally acquire in usa.

[@agy234]

Hint: the hardware will be basically be the same in a cop car vs an ambulance . Sorry to burst your bubble

[@BVN-TEXAS]

Kinda sad he had to tell us he is anti cop and anti Motorola.

[@vurpo7080]

@@BVN-TEXASAny reasonable person would be, tbh

[@BVN-TEXAS]

@@vurpo7080 most cops are decent and next time you need a ambulance or call 911 you can thank Motorola.

[@diablorojo3887]

@@vurpo7080 let me guess, well feed white boy that never work one day in his life

[@SuperPickle15]

@@BVN-TEXAS individuals may be "decent" but they wouldn't be cops very long if they spoke up against the shitty cops...

[@emptytent]

cat break > ad break

[@Rowlesisgay]

get an ad block and a cat.

[@Kalvinjj]

You're correct about the mass, the whole spring resonance frequency function depends solely on the mas and spring constant, where the bigger the mass (and/or softer the spring), the lower the resonant frequency (sqrt(k/m)). The rubber parts themselves work as dampers instead of just plain springs as well. The entire caddy is quite the mechanical engineer R18 material, I love it.

[@joshuahillerup4290]

I worked for a subsidized housing city run company type thing at one point, and the repair people had super ruggedized laptops. While I was there they were switching from hard drives to ssds, and after the switch it really made the massive spring loaded holders for the hard drives feel like overkill

[@markarca6360]

I guess they use one or all of these: Getac, Panasonic Toughbooks or Dell Latitude Rugged laptops.

[@joshuahillerup4290]

@@markarca6360 it was 6 years ago and my memory isn't that great

[@AiOinc1]

My dad is a cop, but they always have had laptops that mount into stands. Panasonic Toughbooks, pretty much universally around where I live. These are really cool though, I'd always heard of and seen photos of them, never seen inside of one. EDIT: Asking my EMS buddy, firetrucks and ambulances don't often have computers in them around here - Just radios. I also want to mention that I have a pair of NEC MultiSync 4:3 monitors that were trash picked from a 911 operator office. So that's cool. 10:50 Yes those connectors can carry many amps, they're used on industrial lead acid battery chargers all the time. They tend to melt about 20 amps. 27:51 Simple physics, moment of inertia. The more it weighs, the more energy it takes to make it start moving. 49:58 I've asked some chip collecting friends of mine what "SECRET" might mean on an Intel BGA. Will get back to you on that.

[@blind1337nedm]

look at it this way, people are gonna fight, wars are gonna occur. Motorola may have made things that save lives of soldiers. most of it is about keeping our own people save and happy and rich, and we all live on the suffering of others. motorola or not, this occurs and we all** benefit from war. ** not all, but those of us who do, like in nato or western nations do.

[@LenKusov]

I know I'm posting a SECOND comment but the reason the Conexant chips look a lot better (and are rarer/more expensive) than most of the others is cause they've got a bit more "stuff" in em to separate the chroma and luma signals, the video from that capture looks like it's comb filtered instead of low-passed to get the colorburst smearing outta there so the signal LOOKS like S-Video quality even though it's over composite. Think my old WinTV card has a similar chip in it, the captures on it look a LOT better than any of the new EZCap trash but it doesn't have a 64-bit driver to run on modern OSes and would need a PCIe to PCI riser to even work on my modern desktop, and the comb filter's image improvement is also the reason why Toshiba CRTs are the cult classic of the retro world - you can get near-RGB-modded quality over the stock composite jacks on old game consoles.

[@netsurferx1]

Me: . Also me (thinking): No surprise that they wanted the video capture to be not only reliable, but also clear. After all, a police car's dashcam is often a *legal record* .

[@Dong_Harvey]

Or on some occasions the dash/body cam wasn't on for some reason!

[@davidew98]

These are used not only for dash cam footage, but also any kind of software that a police officer firefighter or other service member would use. They could use it for a database searching or anything. As for bus computers, one that I have two of is a March networks DVR. It does not have any video output connections. It is meant as a headless appliance. That you connect to via a network connection. You have to use their software to access the system. I actually have all the software for that system and the license keys to get the software installed. My two systems are fully operational. They were also used in building camera security systems.

[@frankhenninger7416]

Every ambulance I've been in just has a rugged laptop. Typically a toughbook that can be taken into the hospital and used to write reports and transfer care. And since I was part of a volunteer ambulance/fire service, all the fire apparatus had the same since we could swap them around as necessary.

[@EricJorgensen]

sure but if a cop has to get out of their car someone might have to catch a bullet

[@hypercalcium]

8:44 I wonder if those are the “high res” recording mode triggers. On the uh Arbiter ? Systems they were always loop recording but that video would be downsampled unless certain triggers were fired. Like, the cop lights turning on, (going code?), the door opening, or a trigger from the cops radio, at which point the footage from a few minutes before and after would be marked as “keep high res” And yeah that cardbus slot looked like where the storage device for the video would go. I got trained to repair these things, but I ain’t no cop

[@morganwolf]

It's worth noting that that's specifically SMA Female (SMAJ) which is the same that's on all of their business band radios made in the last 25 years. (Some older ones had an MX connector) but MiniUHF is that all of their commercial mobiles all have to this day

[@ForTheBirbs]

10:25 the power connector has also been used on Motorola two way radio gear "forever". Cheers

[@lucianodinino]

These are interesting since cars are so inhospitable for computer gear. These days they just use Getac laptops with awful docks that barely work. Not a cop, but I’m a little familiar with the equipment.

[@CathodeRayDude]

The funny thing about this is that everything I've ever been told about cop laptops is that they suck. The getacs, the toughbooks, the Dell rugged machines, any time they come up in conversation someone says they're awful and unreliable. I have no reason to doubt them, especially since, well, the military industrial complex has just a little bit of a history of exploitation.

[@daer2121]

​@CathodeRayDude I can say from experience that ruggedized laptops are extremely well built. Their reliability issues are almost always either user errors or being used in environments well outside their operating range. Service members will complain that ANYTHING is an unreliable piece of crap regardless. Edit: notable caveat: some suffer from cooling issues, as every few years someone forgets how to properly design a thermal system for some reason.

[@NullReference119]

@@CathodeRayDude you'd be surprised how many cops have never met a can of air. I mentioned this to a buddy that's a homicide detective, and he told me later it was like getting a brand new machine.... so yeah most of those overheat and throttle like mad. The weights on the hard drive are almost certainly mass dampers designed to resist jostling. Not sure how well it's tuned but look up tuned mass dampers on wiki... they work quite well.

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

@@CathodeRayDude I have a Toughbook CF-33 for my work and i think it's a great device for my use case. But i don't operate it inside a vehicle nor do i expose it to heat, quite the opposite, i often work in very cold environemts in Europe and east Asia. My impression is that it's very reliable in an industrial setting. I work as a microelectronics engineer. As an european, i don't know why so many people from the U.S. complain about their police.

[@Mister_Brown]

@@hyperturbotechnomike because they get more budget than everything else, buy military equipment with it, then complain about needing more money. oh and they have a nasty habit of abuse and murder and are basically never punished more than having to move to another city. the real problem though is if you even talk about cutting their budgets to something reasonable they respond by not policing at all until they get even more money and more immunity. in short, they are extortionists but legally sanctioned.

[@iamthesargent]

That power supply is commonly used for turning a mobile/car two way radio into a desktop/dispatch unit. Makes sense as both the Motorola "dash mount" radios and the MW800s use the SAE plugs. Unless you were using a trunk mount spectra radio, the newer astro and apx radios are all plug and play.

[@G_Fresh_UK]

You get a Thumbs for the cat alone...

[@TenForceFalls]

As far as ambulance computers, my town used the same thing for a while. My town was sold on a standard kit for all first responders form AT&T. Unfortunately AT&T is garbage in Colorado so it never worked properly. Luckily someone got the town out of that contract but still.

[@daemonspudguy]

The Motorola that provides equipment to cops is different from the Motorola that sells phones to actual humans, and have been since 2011. I usually post a comment to this effect when a non-phone object from Motorola is being showcased.

[@nxtvim2521]

agreed, there are just different companies with the same name and owned by the same people. it's like how Glock sells both handguns and Stallion Horse semen. they're just two completely different divisions of the same company which you'd think the US would consider a monopoly, but I guess not.

[@daemonspudguy]

@@nxtvim2521 nope! Motorola Mobility is owned by Lenovo and Motorola Solutions is independent.

[@JaredJanhsen]

@@nxtvim2521 Not even owned by the same people. The company that sells the cop gear is publicly traded under the MSI stock ticker. The cellphones are owned by Lenovo.

[@echow2001]

Motorola mobility vs mototola solutions

[@Yixdy]

​@@nxtvim2521 the US stopped breaking up monopolies in the 80s my man

[@daxx367]

In terms of cables coming loose inside laptops I actually had this happen the other week. Coworkers teenager dropped their laptop and it stopped charging, coworker brought it in asked if I could take a look. Opened it up and noticed the little white side plug connector was half way out. So I guess it can happen. I will say someone else could have been inside without me or my coworker knowing so take it with a heavy helping of a kid might have wanted a new laptop.

[@YourWishes]

39:20 can't believe you didn't play the "ask the internet" sting, I sure hope someone got fired for that blunder.

[@MxArgent]

Install DOSbox for the ultimate Police Quest experience -- Wrecking trying to leave the starting parking lot never felt so immersive.

[@OMorty]

All Computers Are Beautiful

[@rhyoliteaquacade]

I see what you did there. 😎

[@K3NnY_G]

49:03 - The quality was already pretty high on the content but it's suddenly gone THRU THE FUGGIN' ROOF.

[@AppliedCryogenics]

Mot made a pretty cool-looking text-based cop-puter with a tiny amber CRT: The MDT-9100-386

[@nicoracien1924]

My RF teacher in college disliked the Motorola company because they are all about proprietary hardware and charging a lot of money. He had his catch phrase, in french: Chez Motorola, le moton on l'a means: At motorola, we get the money

[@VulpesHilarianus]

My grandfather often called Motorola industrial equipment "Factory sparkles" because the intent of buying Motorola in such a setting was to lure in engineers. It's like how nowadays startups lure computer science graduates with promises of free company M-series Macbooks and unlimited Kubernetes use.

[@azmax623]

la monnaie?

[@Nor-tc8vz]

Sounds like Apple.

[@rarbiart]

looks like Motorola just made another 2way radio, just with a different PCB.

[@sydneys207]

SSDs were just still that much more expensive back then. The price even in 2012 was $700/TB, compared to $41/TB for HDD. It would have been even worse before that, assuming you could easily get your hands on them.

[@johnsimon8457]

Right.The first MacBook Air came with an SSD and it was like an extra 60% on top of the cost of a HDD MBA. - you want the cutting edge, you're paying for it. It's only until 2010 when these are "enthusiast priced for 128/256GB" (and how much more do you need, really?). The silence alone was worth the upgrade.

[@SPEKERDUDE]

this was very clearly built by Motorola solutions not Motorola the phone company . its very much built like there XPR/APX radios. that's why it has "trailer plug" power connectors and Mini UHF plug as that exactly what they use on the radios. also the internals look remarkably similar to the radios. also looks like its made to fit in the same mounting brackets as the radios. the mini uhf connectors is actually a pretty good idea as they can just use the same cabling and antenna mounts as the 2 way radio systems. likely had external WIFI antenna on the car for downloading video and logs via WIFI in the garage when the vehicle is parked at the end of the day, I used to install police equipment this is pretty typical of Motorola construction

[@daemonspudguy]

Yeah, even when they were technically under the same corporate umbrella, they really kind of weren't. Motorola the people who make phones are actually cool.

[@mixza81]

Nice Winamp (car) computer

[@CathodeRayDude]

Oh man you're right, the mini ITX .net people would have gone absolutely nuts for this thing at the time

[@TimeLemur6]

"It seems like, with their funding, Motorola could've done a better job of designing this." Story of my life.

[@TimeLemur6]

To clarify, the majority of Motorola stuff I've had the displeasure of working with is built like a tank, around a random terrible decision. "Oh, we gave you servers that only have fast Ethernet NICs that for some reason can't auto negotiate? Here's a gigabit switch."

[@dylanovdiyenko5964]

19:31 The P stands for Penryn, which was the codename for the ‘08-‘09 mobile Core 2 Duos. It’s similar to “Haswell” for 4th gen Core i series chips or “Alder Lake” for 12th gen. Same naming scheme. Basically, the process node shrunk from 65nm to 45nm which was able to maintain the same performance at lower TDPs. I believe higher TDP processors may have continued the T prefix even after the Penryn update. At that point, the P series slotted in between the U series for Ultrabooks and the T series for high end. However, if you have a Core 2 Duo from the P series in a machine, you can be reasonably sure that it was made between 2008 and 2010-ish. In the MacBook community at the time, those processor numbers were discussed like crazy. On the Mac side, literally everything aside from the Mac Pro (which had Xeons) was dual core from like 2006 to 2011, so everyone got into debates about which was better so as to justify their 1000+ dollar purchases. I know of people who would go on forums to debate how much faster a P8600 was compared to a T7500. Because the CPUs were all soldered, Apple would charge like 200 dollars to go up in clock speed by 200 mHz, and people would pay because they thought it would “future-proof” their computer. No joke, someone on MacRumors argued that 200 mHz was the speed of an iMac G3, and that made it worth it to go from 2.4 to 2.66 gHz on his 2010 MacBook Pro for a cost of 300 dollars. The environment was WILD.

[@gmanyyavailable]

I remember Win 7 Home Basic being pretty easy to come by in Russia around 2007...2009. It was exactly the "emerging market" experience. This was MS's way of doing regional pricing - Home Basic in Russian cost much less than Home Premium, but it came exclusively in Russian and could not be set to any other language via language packs (itself a novelty at the time). I think, they still do the same thing today for Win 10. And you can find, for example Ubisoft selling special versions of their games on Steam in countries where regional pricing is much lower than the dollar price where the language is also fixed. Had to avoid their games for a long time cause I prefer original VO, not a low effort dub, in my games.

[@JamieEC96]

I've only seen vista home basic on bottom of the barrel netbooks. If I remember rightly you couldn't even change the desktop background

[@lasskinn474]

starter edition is the worst one.

[@kaitlyn__L]

I know it's been said before but god it's been so refreshing going back to this classic style of video this year. As in before the channel was even called Cathode Ray Dude as I recall! Just exploring and disassembling an old weird computer.

[@CathodeRayDude]

keep an eye on my side channel, i'm probably gonna be releasing a big long barely edited teardown of some OPS computers soon lol

[@thefuriousduck]

Man the more times I hear you say lines like "Oh I'm so smart". The less I feel bad about my random encounters during tear downs of weird devices. Love the content CRD!

[@Hittares]

I think the CPU clamp is there to protect it from heavy hits, like a car it mounted in ramming into things - considering its a direct die contact solution and there is no IHS involved, I can imagine a situation where, when applying sufficient force to the enclosure, it could just crack the chip and kill the whole system if there was enough stress on the CPU mounting screws. With the funky dish-and-press configuration it has enough movement to wiggle around in there, if necessary.

[@Catswhiskerdetector]

I love that this is build like a transceiver.

[@abcdef20]

And probably designed by the same guys designing the radios

[@rowansinger3876]

Wohoo for the call out to Anderson Powerpole connectors, they are wonderful !

[@michaelhess4825]

Best camera ever plugged into a cop-puter!

[@atomicskull6405]

99% chance that any large technology company you care to name has military contracts.

[@TomWishaupt]

Regarding HDDs in cars: BMW has been using HDDs for iDrive well into the 2010s! They were surprisingly reliable. Just looked at the service manual; BMW switched to SSDs in July 2020!

[@icanrunat3200mhz]

Iirc, Vista Home Basic didn’t include transparent Aero styling either and was therefore usually included with ultra-low end garbage that couldn’t render Aero. I remember seeing it as a late market upgrade to PCs that originally shipped with XP Home and really should have stayed that way (or shouldn’t have been shipped at all). Like “1.0 Experience Score” PCs.

[@CodeProfessor]

When I was in high school I had a standard ATX pc in my trunk with a Xenarc vga display in the dash, a Harmon usb puck gps, and a d-link external wifi antenna to get all the (I think) 802.11g open networks. I can’t recall the name but there was a dashboard software I purchased that controlled Winamp in the background and sat on top of XP I think. I called it my CarPuter. I also had a specialized power supply that accepted 12 volts from the car and had capacitors to keep it going while the engine cranked, and a pin to connect to the interior light circuit of the car that would trigger startup and shutdown based on dip switch settings. I had to keep the hard drive vertical so the heads wouldn’t crash as often. I would get about 6 months out of a hard drive. Later I upgraded to what I think was called a capuchino pc. I still have the disc for the dashboard software somewhere, I should dig it up. Lol

[@CodeProfessor]

The software was called DigitalDash

[@potappotapov1815]

Thank you for sharing, its really cool

[@boyensn4233]

Here in Germany almost every ambulance, fire truck, cop car etc. Has Motorola Radios.

[@motomike71]

Bad keyboard not an issue for most cops. I imagine they're mostly hunt and peck typers.

[@MuffintopBikini]

I have a few Coban computers for police cars including some of the cameras if you're interested in one. They have 40GB SSDs and a CF card slot and a slot for a removable battery (which I don't have) plus SMA connectors for WiFi antennas. These are interesting machines and meant to sync with a centralized servers over cellular or WiFi when the cars come back to the police station. I have pictures of one I dismantled if you want to see more

[@CathodeRayDude]

Possibly, if its not too redundant vs this one - can you send me an email with the pics? Cathoderaydude at Gmail. Thanks!

[@FoxMccloud42]

3:25 There where some OEMs who had put Vista Home Basic on their computer. A teacher in my school had a notebook, I belive it was a Samsung, which had Vista Home Basic on it from the manufacturer. 31:10 some Toughbook also have a hard drive heater. I forgot my Toughbook CF-29 overnight in my freezing car and the next day when I wanted to used it, it show a message that it is heating the hard drive when I switched it on.

[@catlord9]

This is the best cat video on the internet

[@LenKusov]

I know back in the day, cops HATED being upgraded to these things solely because of the DVR's seamless recording, before this they used something like a Panasonic AG-720 - a VHS CCTV portable. I think there might've also been DVD based systems but they never really caught on, something about "hot car on a bumpy road" really doesn't agree with DVD burners considering if you get the disc too hot they get corrupted and there's only so much error correction a burner can do when you're bombing speed bumps and jumping curbs at pedestrian-splattering speeds. Reason cops loved the VHS based systems was cause of how, every 2 hours (most departments liked SP mode for seeing license plates), you'd get a couple minutes of "I get to obey your constitutional rights even less" which could be extended quite easily by pulling the fuse while it was still rewinding - no discontinuity jump in the video if it's not recording when you pull the fuse. It's why even in cases where cops had dashcams from the 80's to the mid 2000s, they always """mysteriously""" didn't have footage of their brutality incidents. The other thing was, much like how airline pilots will """forget"""" to pull the circuit breaker for their CVR after a big incident that's their fault, the cops would also conveniently not come back to the station to swap the tapes out after a report-worthy incident and instead go on a 2-hour coffee break with the engine running "for air conditioning"... Also yeah, I hate those SAE plugs for 12V stuff if for NO OTHER REASON than "because it's way too easy to blow something up with them". Both halves of the plug are the exact same but with opposite polarities, so if you own, say, a cigarette lighter cable for your portable VCR and the alligator clip leads for your battery maintainer, there's a very good chance the Good Idea Fairy says "hey, why don't you use those clip leads so you don't need to bodge together an adapter to use it off gel cells?" and you don't realize that the polarities of those two plugs are reversed... Only good thing about em is that the 2-pin ones will fit perfectly into a 4-pin SAE trailer plug, which saved my bacon on one road trip when the cigarette lighter went out and I needed to run my ancient Magellan GPS to find my way across 3 states without a copilot to read the road atlas, just clipped the leads onto the cigarette charger and plugged em into the trailer plug. Had to drive with the fog lights on the whole time, but that wasn't an issue.

[@Yixdy]

Gotta love our overly militarized police force! Protecting and serving the SHIT out of us for over a hundred years!

[@humidbeing]

I totally believe they would do something like this, but weren't their timestamps overlayed on the vhs tape video franes? Doing this would be obvious from the huge timeskip jump, right?

[@LenKusov]

@@humidbeing Only if you've got a lawyer that knows about the trick, a prosecutor who won't just say "objection, irrelevant" when asked to fast forward all the way to the other end of the tape, and a police department that actually gives you the tape itself instead of just the clip of the actual incident if there is one. The skip's in the rewind zone, there's ALWAYS a time skip on VHS CCTV footage because there's no true "loop" recording - the player HAS to rewind the tape back to the start before it starts recording again, and what's an extra 3 minutes of missing footage when you've got qualified immunity?

[@uploadJ]

SAE plugs - trailer-light connectors is where you saw those in the past. Maybe four pole for brake and turn signal lights on a trailer.

[@LenKusov]

@@uploadJ Oh I know, read the second paragraph lol, the 2-pole SAE connectors are also compatible with trailer light 4-pole plugs, just gotta drive with the fog lights on so the running light prong on the trailer plug's got constant 12V power. Just annoying cause which prong is hot vs neutral is pretty arbitrary based on what the particular cord came from, the 2-prong ones are mostly seen on trickle chargers where the polarity is seemingly random between brands cause some brands consider the car's battery to be the "master" while others call the charger the master, the master shouldn't have exposed 12V on the male half of the plug but when both sides have 12V on them it's kinda just "put it wherever"

[@graywolf2694]

I would imagine they use these in firetrucks and ambulances as well.

[@badspecgamer128]

That oblong connector looks like ssf8470 it’s an external sass connector designed for ruggedised computers A friend of mine is a bus mechanic and they use them all the time They plug it into a laptop run the software that clones all the data(usually cctv) and dumps it to the server so it can be managed

[@JadeLockpicker]

you know what. I could watch hours of Soba purring like that.

[@paulmurgatroyd6372]

If every video on KZbin had a cat interlude, the world would be a better place.

[@red_ben3487]

You missed the perfect opportunity to say "good enough for government work"

[@KDHofAvalon]

@CathodeRayDude I completely understand your feelings relating to cop/military gear. I left a previous employer because they pivoted HARD to that stuff and away from gear designed for fire departments/hospitals/ambulances.

[@Kackspack0815]

Surprise inspection… 😄 When I was in school and made my homework, sometimes our cat came to me, jumped on the table an laid down on my exercise book. 😊 Or you are doing something on the computer and your cat walks over the keyboard (and/or lays down on that). 😄 ❤️🐈🐈‍⬛❤️

[@MegaZeta]

#1 feature of equipment sold to police in the U.S.: you overcharge them for it, because they'll pay it, just to hike the budget next year

[@TheInternetLord]

Got a couple of ToughBooks at my fire department. And if you think that drive heater is weird, you should see what the CF-30 hard drive caddy looks like. I took a couple pictures of them when I converted them to SSDs and its full of foam and surrounded by flexable PCBs with traces in them to warm the drives up while they are in colder enviroments. We are looking to get newer models like some CF-31s or maybe something else entirely. I could see if I could get you some of the laptops we use in the fire trucks if your intrested in them. They arent anything special though just Panasonic CF-30s.

[@hypercalcium]

49:04 how do you make cat interludes so charming

[@CathodeRayDude]

oh it's all her, I just witness it

[@NovanityHB]

K i t t y

[@Melech]

The design with that springloaded thing for the cpu makes sense. If youre concerned about vibrations you want every screw fully tightened down. With a more classic cpu bracket the screws would be under springtension.

[@EyeMWing]

Those SAE plugs are most commonly found in the 4 pin variety, as trailer lighting connectors. Wander around to the back of any pickup or suv and there’s probably one in plain sight and if not, behind a cover somewhere. And yes, they are disgusting feeling to plug in. They do actually retain surprisingly well because the pins aren’t cylinders, but actually a weird chess pawn shape that kind of positively engages

[@coolsnake1134]

I was actually going to mention that also, they look like a two-pin version of the trailer light connectors and yes I hate those because you never feel like they're plugging in correctly and most of my trailering is jet skis or boats meaning the trailer lights go in the water so sometimes when the lights work I can't tell if it's the plug not plugged in or the lights just acting up because they got wet. I much prefer the seven pin round connector on my camper

[@kasamialt]

That video capture chip is in the same line as, though sadly not compatible with, the CX23883 and similar. Those have a clean enough signal path that they're the basis of the CXADC project which uses them as a PCI/PCIe SDR receiver for archiving modulated analog video like laserdisc, VHS etc.

[@encorespod2135]

Dude, that is a big dashcam.

[@johnmay4803]

love these little guys so much this is the second time ive watched this and i will be watching all of them again! thank you again for your amazing work there really interesting and funny plus please send my best to Darea and i hope she gets better soon.

[@233kosta]

The weighting is there for sharp, fast shocks. The extra mass means it just won't accelerate as fast, and that's ultimately what you're trying to achieve. It also works in tandem with the flexibility of the rubber mounts. You can use a stiffer material when it's heavier.

[@zacherymaloney]

I have to wonder if the spring loaded clamp for the CPU die is used rather than screws in an effort to prevent having the silicon die itself act as a hard-mounted pressure point in the chassis. I've never designed rugged electronics, but with the lengths they went through to protect the other sensitive components like the hard drive it makes sense to me.

[@DigitalJedi]

When I used to repair laptops I would occasionally get an old ruggedized thinkpad or some other toughbook-like thing meant to be chucked in a suitcase or whatever. Lenovo used to exclusively mount the heatsink to the board in those applications so the surface of the die was never moving relative to it. Others would shock mount the whole board and use the heatsink's mounting posts as part of that, and then whack a big thermal pad in place. I'm surprized this thing didn't look like it used a thick pad for the CPU like they did for the chipset, but maybe that residue down there is just the remains of a thin one. Most interesting solution I've seen was Panasonic splitting up the board into a CPU & RAM board, MXM GPU connector with some flex in it, and then a sea of ribbon cables to I/O boards both internal and external. On one had that was the most modular laptop I've ever worked on. On the other hand it took 43 screws to release the GPU for a vram replacement.

[@snottily]

the length of the monitor cable should have put an end to the thought of 'trunk'

[@sklay78]

I once ripped the computer out of a Mazak CNC. A Slant Turn 60, specifically. It was the most rugged machine I've ever seen. Lesser CNC machines can and often are, powered by a basic PC with some kind of interface card, but that Mazak was on a different level. The user interface was provided by a low spec, low power PC running Windows, which was more than enough because importing G code or building a program wasn't very intensive, and that's all it has to do. The hardware of the machine was operated by a Seiko RISC based system. They communicated via SCSI. The Seiko machine that actually drives the hardware; servo drives, spindle, measurement eye, tools mag or turret, looked aircraft grade. All the cards that plugged into it had big, blocky pin connectors. Everything screwed together. Dust sealed. Each component of the machine had a driver board, and those interfaces with big amplifiers mounted in a large cab at the back of the machine that drove the real power to the servos, motors, and encoders. It was a fascinating machine to take apart. I'd never seen a machine set up quite like that.

[@onyxtay7246]

I work on an ambulance, but IIRC the cops here are all on the same dispatch system and use similar stuff. I know Fire uses the same tablets for CAD, but cops might be using full laptops. Not sure how things are in other areas. Having a docked tablet sorta solves the problem of having a computer in a hot car when it's not in service, since you can just take it inside. It also means that your computer dying won't knock a rig out of service. You just swear at the thing and get a replacement. All the important stuff is stored on the dispatch center's server anyways. We got our tablets replaced about a year ago, but until then we were using an *old* dispatch software. Like, it was unsupported because the company that made it went out of business almost a decade ago. They got bought out and the new owners finally stopped supporting it. So now we got a new software that's even worse and doesn't know how to wrap the labels on a map correctly. It'll wrap them *off* *the* *damn* *screen* and I recognize this is now a rant about software but it is an _incredibly_ frustrating thing when you're trying to figure out what road to turn down for the *CPR* *call.* Anyways, point is that they had some tablets from probably 5 years ago (I think that's when this company got the contract) running the software. So tablets have been in use for a while now. Depending on how you define a while. But since a good quarter of the industry has already been taken out by back injuries in that time I'd count it. Not sure about other computers stashed around to run other parts of the ambulance. It'd probably depend on the model. I on some I'll hear a relay click when I do basically anything, but others don't.

[@blockofdynamite]

Kitty! Belly rubs! Blessed by kitty's appearance :D

[@ve2vfd]

I drive a fire engine for a big city department and the onboard dispatch computers in all our units are nothing special, just public safety versions of Panasonic Toughbooks connected to a cell/wifi/gps radio modem and mounted in a cradle.

[@AppaTalks]

Fascinating breakdown and review! Thank you for sharing

[@sp00nix]

I just got one of these at the Dayton hamfest, totally complete to boot! There was a surprise Kenwood VHF radio in the box too. all for $2. Everything works!

[@kc8ufv]

The power supply is a standard Motorola radio power supply for using their radios on mains instead of in a car

[@logannosleep5]

Ryzen thin clients with PCIE is about the best mini PCs. Also I would love to hear the reasons why you dislike Motorola.... About every big tech company commits crimes against humanity to bring us our technologies.....