Sometimes there’s nothing more rewarding than pulling apart an old piece of hardware of mysterious origin. [saveitforparts] does just that, and recently came across a curious satellite system from a surplus store. What else could he do, other than tear it down and try to get it humming?Â
The device appeared to be satellite communication device for a tracking unit of some sort, complete with a long, thick proprietary cable. That led to a junction box with a serial port and an RJ45 port, along with some other interfaces. Disassembly of the unit revealed it contained a great deal of smarts onboard, including some kind of single-board computer. Comms-wise, it featured a cellular GPRS interface as well as an Orbcomm satellite modem. It also packed in GPS, WiFi, Xbee, Ethernet, and serial interfaces. It ultimately turned out to be a Digi ConnectPort X5 device, used as a satellite tracking system for commercial trucks.
What’s cool is that the video doesn’t just cover pulling it apart. It also dives into communicating with the unit. [saveitforparts] was able to power it up and, using the manufacturer’s software, actually talk to the device. He even found the web interface and tested the satellite modem.
Ultimately, this is the kind of obscure industry hardware that most of us would never come into contact with during our regular lives. It’s neat when these things show up on the secondary market so hackers can pull them apart and see what makes them tick. Video after the break.
Thumbs up for Ax-Man!
Interesting tear down!
Nothing like Ax-Man in MD/PA/DE area, that I know of… :(
Bought a lot of fun junk from Gateway Electronics in St. Louis in the 1980’s. I lament their demise…
tl;dr it reads its GPS postion, optionally some data from CAN bus of a vehicle and then sends it through Iridum sat-modem to a server.
And what does the cellular modem do?
Let me guess, it used celular modem as primary link, and sattelite as backup for areas not covered with cellular network. Sattelite was, and still is, expensive.
Around that time period, some trucking companies used meteoric scatter for tracking as well.
For context, in Latin America, some countries are so sparsely populated that thieves would get away with stealing entire trucks and hiding them.
I use to work for a transportation company that used a similar tracking system from a company that shall remain nameless. The tracking device used the GPS satellites for determining the vehicle’s location, which it would report in every 5 minutes to the company that owned the vehicles. It would send the location data to the company’s servers via the cellular modem. It could also receive routing data via cellular from the company’s servers and display all the route data and ongoing location on a 7-inch screen that was in each vehicle. The vehicles used a combo antenna on the roof of the vehicle that looked like a hockey puck (the GPS antenna) with a small cellular antenna sticking out of the top of the “puck”.