Walkabout Hammerhead P233 tablet restoration

[Retroplayer]

I picked up a Hammerhead P233 tablet recently and I am in the beginning stages of restoration/modification.

The base features are:
Pentium 233mhz
64MB RAM
20GB IDE HDD (must have been replaced at some point, stock is supposed to be 3.2GB or 6.4GB)
9.5" transflective monochrome LCD VGA resolution
Wacom digitizer (from Pen Computing Magazine, this is apparently a proximity-sensing electromagnetic type)
2 Type II PCMCIA slots
Infrared com port on rear
7.2V NIMH battery (dead)
12V center polarity DC jack for charging/power (I assume about 3A) Works with my 5.5x2.5 adapter

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There is a 50 pin dock connector on the rear which looks something like a mini centronics style. Trying to determine what the mating connector is.
Found a Reddit thread that provided a pinout
The 20GB HDD was not working in the tablet. Will need to see if it is truly dead. Hoping that I can at least get drivers and utilities out of it before full death
NIMH battery is dead, should be possibly to rebuild

It is going to be pretty useless without at least a keyboard. Getting the parts to wire in a PS2 port until I can figure out the docking connector part number
Hard drive will be replace with a CF card
3 com ports appear to be available on the docking connector. COM1 has all signals and the other two only RX and TX. Full parallel port, VGA, and audio outputs also available.

The rubber housing is beginning to get a little sticky. I may get plastidip spray and apply a couple of coats to seal and resurface it.

This is certainly one of those projects where you ask yourself if the effort is worth it, but the specs hit that sweet spot for me. It has that look and chunkiness that makes it look 80s even though it appears to have been made in 2000.

I wanted to post about it here in the hopes that others have experience with this model and also to gather the data in one place for those searching for information in the future.

I am attaching the docking connector information for now.

Pen Computing Magazine review:
http://pencomputing.com/archive/PCM27/Hardwar … /walkabout.html

Reddit thread with some external and internal pictures:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … _was_the_worst/

Anyone here have any experience with these?

 

[SteveHere]

I had a later model Hammerhead XRT, not the same machine. Mine had a single USB port so I added a hub, keyboard, mouse, and USB storage to get it working, details here:

Walkabout Computing - Hammerhead XRT Tablet

Over the last months I've been buying Retro tech from a gentleman in St. Paul that I met through a mutual friend. He's been collecting for ...

writtenoutput.blogspot.com

Good luck with your repairs, I look forward to hearing how the project goes for you.

 

[Retroplayer]

I finally received the vehicle mount and it has a PS2 connector which I couldn't see from the auction photos. The docking connector is also a nice ribbon cable with 2.54mm headers which makes it convenient for making my own dock.

But the big reveal is that now I know what the mating connector part number is: 3M 10150

These two part numbers are the solder cup version of the connector and the cable hood: 10150-3000PE & 10350-52A0-008 ($14 from China.)

After getting into the BIOS, I see settings for USB. The vehicle mount also has USB. I will try that once I figure out my hard drive issue. I tried a couple different hard drives and a CF adapter and none seemed to be recognized. In the bios, there is only AUTO for the hard drive and nothing I can set. There might have been an additional tool. Waiting on my PCMCIA floppy drives to boot up and copy over some of the tools I recovered from the HDD.

Sadly, after flopping the display around a few times, I have a small missing section. Sometimes this can be repaired, but one thing at a time! I already went off on a small tangent writing code to convert the wireless infrared WebTV keyboard to PS2 with the intention of mounting it inside the tablet permanently.

 

[Retroplayer]

While I have been focused on the Libretto restoration, another P233 tablet popped up for a decent price, so I have snagged it. Hopefully I will end up with both fully working, but at least this will help ensure I end up with one fully working.

 

[Retroplayer]

The second Hammerhead tablet was fully working even though it was cheaper than the first one and from the description I had lower prospects of getting it working. The hard drive was just sticking a bit and eventually it knocked itself loose and started working.

I have been trying to find a compatible inductive tablet pen for it. I first bought a pen for later Hammerhead models and that did not work. I then bought a wacom tablet from the same time period thinking that would likely work, but unfortunately not. I could spend a small fortune by randomly buying things. So I am holding off on that for now. I will need to get back inside the tablet and identify the controller used and maybe that will give me some more hints.

BTW, looking at Windows 95 on a monochrome yellow backlit sunlight readable LCD is just a marvel.

I created some Arduino code to receive the IR protocol that the cheap WebTV IR keyboards use and convert to PS2. The ultimate intention is to make a receiver small enough to cram inside the tablet. Secondary, it becomes a nice way to repurpose these wireless keyboards for other retro computers.