Xplore GeneSys II tablet PC?
Google the title and you’ll see what I mean. They exist, but apparently there isn’t much information online for them. Since I ordered one over eBay recently, and spent quite a bit of time searching for infomation on them, I’ve decided to write up everything I know on them to help some other lost soul.
Here's a photo of two of the tablets, photo credit to seller "comp-plus" on eBay
Quick details of the one I’ve ordered:
- Xplore GeneSys II
- 500mhz PIII processor
- 10.4″ Ultrabright SVGA (800×600) screen
- Rugged design
According to Xplore Technologies website, the GeneSys II is now supported by a company know as Stratix Corp, so you’ll have to search there for more information. However, the Xplore website still has the drivers and firmware updates up, so you may not need to contact Stratix Corp.
Batteries and adapters seem scarce, however, I have heard universal laptop adapters work fine in either 12v or 15v mode. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this claim though!
UPDATE: I’ve tried out a 12v 1A adapter (Centre pole positive) on the tablet with the right plug size and it works fine. I still take no liability for this information however.
Other than that the rest of the info I can manage to find is just for classified auction, or pages describing how the tablet is used in some rough application.
I can’t get the MT 7.16 driver to work, or the 3M SC3 driver to work. I’m worried because the MT 7.16 appears to detect the screen fine (shows COM 3 and a firware version). It might be reading the 3M daughter board, yet there is a problem with the cables or the touchscreen itself.
On the bright side, the dock works, the tablet gets power through it, the USB ports work and the PCMCIA network card is recognized.
Regarding the thermal grease…
I didn’t like how hot the CPU heat spreader was getting. It seems like they were using 1/16″ or so of thermal paste to get the heat to the case. I made a copper shim to go between the aluminum spreader and the magnesium case and coated both sides with artic silver. Now the case gets hot much faster and the heat spreader is not as hot. Should be more stable.
Just finished installing usb 2.0 pcmcia card. Wired directly to a mini 4 port usb hub, installed internally. Added bluetooth for connecting my bluetooth gps receiver, mouse and keyboard. Added wireless usb with external antenna. Reception is unbelievable. Running xp with BMW, VW, Mercedes diagnostic software. This machine is awesome for this use. Also have DeLorme Street Atlas, and Centrafuse installed.
Forgot to add that I installed a usb sound card with two 3.5 audio jacks for speaker and mic.
I suppose getting 550MHz out of P3 700 is inevitable since the mobo doesn’t support speedstep. I guess to get 700 would require an 850MHz processor, but I don’t know if the voltage (or thermals) is compatible. I haven’t found any info on modding to switch to the higher speed.
I think my touchscreen is dead because the system can talk to the microtouch controller board. I think the key to the 5-wire touch sensor is wire #3, which should show some resistive connection to each of the other 4 when the screen is touched. Mine shows open circuit on this wire all the time.
So now I have the HDD, CPU and RAM upgraded with the dock, all for a worthless tablet.
Also, a word of warning when handling the LCD. There is a very delicate coating on the top of the LCD that can not be touched or it is ruined.
I got the tablet to run at 700MHz by putting in an 850MHz processor.
I tried another motherboard, another microtouch board and another screen, but I still can’t get the touch screen to work. The system does talk to the microtouch board (com goes down when it is removed).
I put 512MB in and the BIOS detects it as 256MB. I’m not aware of any BIOS updates available anywhere. If GII tablets ever came with 512, it’s also possible that there was a motherboard revision. Both motherboards I have say GII Tablet version: 011
Just bought an IX104RD from Xplore. It blows away my Gen 2. Has audio out, speakers,lighter,digitizer and touch,monitor out,internal mini pci, and was able to use a 250gb hdd. Best part is batteries are available.
If anybody has a working touchscreen they can part out please let me know.
I just realized that the GII and Genesys maximus are the same size. It looks like they share the same rubber bumpers, back case half and possibly the same motherboard. I’m guessing that the fronts (case + touchscreen + LCD) could be swapped between the two models.
So does Chuck have an email address (from when he posted) for Mr. christopher henneck and his supposed pile of parts?
Sure do, send an email to chuck AT xtarutaru.com and I’ll give you the email Christopher contacted me from. I never got a response from him though.
I have had a couple of these for a couple months, and have thought they were dead. Being bored one day, I pulled one of them out of storage, and plugged it in to a universal adapter. I saw the green light come on! I installed Debian Linux from another computer onto a IDE hard drive using QEMU, stuffed it in the tablet, and got it to boot to BIOS. It now says something about the boot sector being corrupted. Could anyone tell me what I should do to fix this? I’m using grub as the bootloader, and it works from within QEMU. I can boot to BIOS and mess with settings. I don’t have a dock, so to CD or floppy
. I’ll try ReactOS on it and see if that works or not.
I installed ReactOS to the first partition of my HD, put the HD back in the Xplore, booted, and was greeted by the friendly interface of GRUB. I have no idea why it now works, I’m guessing the bootloader ReactOS uses made the tablet’s BIOS find GRUB or something… Now I have another problem. The power supply I’m using can only supply 12V, 1300 mA. Now at a random time during boot it dies. Time to buy a better power adapter I guess.
Oh yeah, does anyone know if batteries for these can be found anywhere, or could be DIYed? I don’t have batteries unfortunately.
From the sounds of it Greg DIYed one. I still haven’t found a reliable source for the batteries either, so the search continues. I really have to sum up the info in these comments in another post soon…
Anyway, by the sounds of it you need to do a complete reinstall on that hard drive in order to boot the tablet from it. Usually plugging it into a desktop with just a CD-ROM attached and installing the operating system from the ground up works.
It now boots, but the universal power adapter evidently can’t supply enough power to it. If I turn the backlight to about 20% brightness it will usually allow me to login and mess with stuff, but it will shut down eventually. There is the possibility of a short or something inside the tablet, but I doubt it.
I believe I used a 2amp adapter in order to get the tablet to boot and work properly. It may even have been a 2.5amp. I know 1amp failed rather quickly when I used it, so I believe your running into the same problem.
I believe that originally they were designed to run on 17V or so but would run on 12V, although they would not charge the batteries at that voltage. I use an old 18V laptop charger 3.3A and it works fine, so anything between those voltages will work, provided it puts out enough current. Power = Voltage X Current so 1300 mA MAY be enough at 18V. I also made up a cigarette lighter plug to run it in my car.
I think I found the batteries somewhere, but they are expensive. You can repair it yourself, just buy 9 18650 LI-IOn cells with tabs (you’ll pay $5-$10/each). 3 cells in series is like 11.1 or 11.2V, so it should be possible to charge on the 13.5V or so available in the police cars these were intended for. But yeah, 12V is probably not going to give you a charge.
As for charging, I have been successfully recharging the internal battery off of vehicle 12-13.5V for a while now. No problems.
The problem is I don’t have batteries at all, dead or otherwise. Could I make my own battery pack easily, maybe by ripping the control board out of an old cheap battery?
The battery you need is NI2040. You can get one from Battery Universe, but they want $135. I remember there being another equivalent part number, but I can’t find anything now. The pinout should be available on the Inspired Energy website, but I don’t know if the controller from some other battery pack would work. If so, I guess you could just build the battery pack right into the tablet. Non-removable wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe somebody here has a totally dead one they could part with so that you could re-cell it. Maybe the 2040 will come up on eBay from time to time?
The other compatible battery is MPE201 or MPE201 plus.
I have come across several bad touch screens and only one good one. Here is an easy way to test the screen itself:
-Unplug the touch screen from the controller (5-pin AMP, where the flex circuit meets the wires)
-connect an ohmmeter from the center pin (3) to any of the others
-touch the screen
If the resistance comes into some finite value when you touch and measures open circuit when you don’t, the screen is good. On all of them I’ve found bad, that center pin is open circuit all the time. I assume something breaks between layers of glass.
You probably have the right driver if the microtouch software communicates with the controller.
I do have one currently unused tablet. The motherboard in this one died — so I haven’t tested the touch screen. If your interested Luke I can sell it to you for 15$ + shipping. I’ve tried tinkering with it again recently to no avail, so I figure you may find it more useful now than me.
I can include the dead motherboard too if you like. (It may not be dead, I just can’t get it working.)
Or actually I’ll even trade it for some other computer gadget of equal value (such as an old laptop). Just let me know if your interested.
Regarding dead motherboards, when I got mine, (I bought 2) one worked, and one didn’t – no boot, no LEDs, no nothing. I called the guy who sold them to me and he told me to wiggle the flat ribbon cable going to the top of the motherboard while it was plugged into the power supply and watch the LED power light. So put it all together and slip your hand between the top of the board and the top half of the machine and jiggle away. It worked fine for me.
We purchased a few of these for a work project that requires a very basic PC and application. We’re having a hard time getting drives that are small enough to work and yet reliable. Does anyone have any newer bios files that might allow more modern hard drives to function?
I can confirm that an old IBM TravelStart 40GB HD will work. I pulled it out of a broken PowerBook G3. Just remove the adapter thingy to get to the IDE pins.
Regarding the ribbon cable to the front panel buttons…
The printed conductors on there wear out causing this problem. However, it looks like they are a little longer than they need to be. I had success trimming the end of it a little shorter so that fresh conductor was up on the connector pins.
As for RAM, my experience is that 128MB works all the time, but 256MB and 512MB chips are recognized at 1/2 of their actual value. Anybody know of a specific brand of 512MB that is recognized correctly?
Regarding the Maximus:
I have one of these running now. The whole back of it is identical to a Genesys ii. The motherboard version is the same, but something is different in the BIOS. On my Genesys ii’s, I have to use a PS/2 keyboard with the dock to have a keyboard at boot. With the Maximus, a USB keyboard works at boot, but only from 1 of the 2 USB ports. The touch screen is flipped diagonally from the Genesys ii. The video resolution is the same (800×600), but the LCD connects to the smaller video connector on the mobo, just above where the Genesys screen connects. There is a short extension harness for the inverter high voltage wires since the CCT wires are down at the bottom corner of the screen. The one I have is transflective, so you can see it in sunlight or use reflected light to view it. The downside is the the color is kind of weak and it looks worse under normal indoor conditions.
Cooling the CPU:
There is supposed to be a large copper heat spreader in the back of the case. It’s maybe 1.5″ x 6″ long. On the units I’ve opened with the hard drive and hard drive pad removed, the copper piece was missing as well. You need something in there to help get the heat to the case, as this is the only real cooling for the CPU.
For some reason, the 700MHz CPUs seem slightly shorter than the 500MHz CPUs. So upgrading the CPU can lead to it not even touching the spreader! I haven’t verified if there is any difference in the aluminum heat spreaders installed from the factory. What I’ve done to retrofit the 700MHz into a 500MHz machine is to buy the 850Mhz chip and then carefully grind the heat spreader standoffs so they are just a little shorter. I tried putting a copper shim between the cpu and spreader and it was not enough to allow continuous operation. Your experience may vary, but definitely check this out if you are upgrading.
I installed integrated wireless on the Maximus.
I used a Contec DS110 (PCMCIA) card, which has a removable planar antenna. This lets it fit in the PC slot and gives two MMCX-RP connectors. I spliced this MMCX-RP cable into a bulkhead SMA-RP, which mounts on top of the tablet. So I can attach or detach the “rubber duck” antenna whenever I want to. I used the driver for Linksys WPC11, since that card uses the same chipset. It works pretty good, but I haven’t tested the range yet.
I could mount a wifi antenna on the outside of the vehicle and run an SMA cable to the tablet, but I probably won’t bother.
It has been a while since i was last on here. It seems like there has been a lot of progress made on these old machines. I put mine away for a while because the touch screen barley worked and i didn’t want to fry it trying to hack together a battery. The battery and dock pin-outs are what I’m most interested in right now.
Greg, if I read correctly you used a different battery charge controller to charge the l-ion cells with, was this a spare tablet battery or from a laptop battery? and if so, did you modify the genesys’s battery connector circuitry?
I received a Maximus and attempted to apply power. No lights appear.
Where is the hard disk? Is it in the back of the case? I haven’t gotten that far in dismantling it yet.
I plan to build a proper power supply from a Sony 16V 3.75A supply with a connector I have that fits, then trace power inside to see how far it goes.
Any warnings about dismantling?
Thanks,
Bret
When we got no lights it was often related to the connectors to the front panel not being seated correctly- the catch is that these connectors are a conductive paint on top of plastic and they were out easily. If you don’t get any kind of front panel lights then the power switch won’t work either.
We’ve used a few of these for a project at work- certainly not the fastest machines but nice and compact. If you had a few spares it’s worth using them but without spares I don’t know if I’d bother. We were able to buy 6 and make 4 work reliably.
I opened it and see what you mean.
I’m a bit underwhelmed by that design choice – “Can handle anything!” (except being taken apart for repair).
Don’t have a spare of that ribbon cable, do you?
We don’t have any spares that I know of but I did repair one with a conductive paint marker. You can find them from some electronics supply places. Allelectronics.com comes to mind but I’m not sure they have them.
One of ours had an old Win2k install that we cloned to make the others work. I really wish we’d taken the time to build a stripped down XP install for them. I think they would have run a lot better that way.
Jamie