Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Motorola Lapdock 100 just in.

I just got a Motorola LapDock 100 in. These were discontinued and I didn't do my research too well. Apparently, the original Atrix Lapdock is the one to get with the larger screen and ease-of-hack to convert them into portable monitors. There is very little documentation and mix-messages on the newer Lapdock 100.

Well, I'll find out in a few days if the LapDock 100 is as easy to improvise as the original Atrix Lapdock.

If you are not tuned-in on what these do, let me explain. A few years ago Motorola made these expensive (think $500) add-on phone accessories that turned their Atrix phones into netbooks. It was way ahead of its time and flopped and these have been in the discount bins. They have micro-usb and micro-hdmi connectors. And with the original Atrix lapdock, you can buy some adapter cables and turned them into dummy portable monitors with attached keyboard/trackpads. Many people have connected Android sticks and Raspberry PIs into pseudo ARM laptops. I just want to use them as a portable extra monitor with keyboard/mouse for the bench.





Unlike the original Atrix dock, the Lapdock 100 has a universal cable with Micro USB male and Micro HDMI-D male. There are some confusion whether or not they are locked to newer Motorola phones with some sort of authentication. I will find out shortly once my adapter converter cables come in.


Here are some you tube videos to illustrate what can be done with the original lapdock (and potentially the newer one).




and






3 comments:

  1. I have not been able to get the device to stay on. It will display the HDMI signal briefly, but then shut off (but even getting this far is not trivial since the RPI will also auto-senses for HDMI so I modified the boot config to keep the HDMI output alive on the Raspberry).
    The pin 3-to-4 grounding trick (Google for "
    Raspberry Pi Lapdock HDMI cable work-around") is very hard to attempt since even when I got the case open (with involves partially breaking it) the HDMI pins are hidden away. I have not tested it (yet).
    If you have any success, please feel encouraged to share it.

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    1. I'm not having any luck either. That is probably because I don't have the USB adapter yet. I only have the HDMI female adapter and this doesn't act like a dumb monitor like the older Atrix dock. I'll continue to try it out before putting it on craigslists.

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  2. You think I'd be able to remove the keyboard from the lapdock and have it function as a screen (while connected to my old Razr)? I'd like to mount this in the kitchen and connect the phone to my home server so I could stream audio/video while we're cooking. Haven't cracked the unit open yet to see the guts and determine if this is possible. Any thoughts/ideas?

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