About This Archive¶

This site is a reconstruction. Motorola published the Moto Mods developer documentation at developer.motorola.com, then retired the product and took the portal down. What follows is what the Wayback Machine preserved of it, converted into readable Markdown and rebuilt as a static site.

Nothing here is new writing. Where a page says "buy", "sign up" or "contact us", it is the original 2016 copy talking to a developer who no longer exists; those paths are dead and are kept only because removing them would misrepresent what the documentation said.

What was captured¶

Two generations of the portal were archived, and both are represented here.

The 2016 Squarespace portal was the complete developer site: system architecture, eleven firmware protocols, seven Android software guides, the MDK user guide, developer tooling, nine worked examples, hardware pages and the partner programme. 56 of the 63 pages on this site come from it.

The 2017 Drupal portal replaced it with a smaller documentation set. Most of its pages are the same text reflowed into a new template, but a few were genuinely revised — its Debug and Log and MDK Overview run several times longer than the originals — and those are the versions you read here. 5 pages come from it, along with the downloads list and the certification programme.

Every page records its origin in the front matter of its source file:

source_url: http://developer.motorola.com/explore/firmware/display
source_capture: 2016 Squarespace portal

The duplicate pages that did not earn a place in the navigation are not lost: all 72 pages, in every capture of them, are kept as untouched HTML in the archive/ directory of the repository, with archive/index.json recording where each came from.

What was recovered¶


Documentation pages	63
Images and diagrams	106
Design files, schematics and archives	8
Total assets	~23 MB
Assets that could not be recovered	9

About a third of the images were served from static1.squarespace.com and were never mirrored into the page captures. Those were recovered by querying the Wayback Machine's CDX index for the exact archived URL — often a resized ?format=1000w variant, since the original URL itself was never captured — and downloading that.

What is missing¶

Nine assets exist in no capture anywhere, and the pages that used them say so where they appeared:

Diagrams — firmwaredisplay-diagram-01.png, fwaudio-diagram-1.png, fwaudio-diagram-2.png, modusb-diagram-01.png. These illustrated the display, audio and USB protocol pages. The surrounding text is intact.

Design files — mdk_back_cover_STEP.zip, personality-card-assembly_STEP_0.zip, personality-card-housing_STEP.zip, personality-card-housing_STL.zip. The MDK schematic PDF, the back-cover STL, the perforated PCB STEP file, ModLib and the four daughterboard hardware archives all survived and are on the Downloads page.

Beyond assets, some things were never static pages and so could not be captured: the developer forums (hosted by element14), the login-gated partner material, and the contact and registration forms. Links to those are preserved as they were written, and no longer lead anywhere.

The Moto Mods SDK for Android API reference was not lost — see below.

How it was rebuilt¶

The conversion is scripted and reproducible; the tooling lives in tools/ in the repository.

discover.py walks both snapshots and identifies every Moto Mods page, classifying it by which portal generation served it.
manifest.py decides which capture becomes which page and in what order — the one place the site's shape is defined.
convert.py extracts each page's content region, drops navigation, tracking and dead forms, rewrites internal links and asset URLs, and converts to Markdown. Protocol tables are kept as HTML: they use rowspan, colspan and repeated header groups that a Markdown table cannot express.
fetch_assets.py localises every image and file, pulling from the captures first and the Wayback Machine second.
mark_missing.py annotates what could not be found.
gen_mkdocs.py writes the navigation.

Text was not edited. Headings, typos and all — Software: Mod Mangement is spelled that way because it was spelled that way — the words are Motorola's.

Source code links¶

The documentation links to the platform's source repositories — the NuttX firmware stack, the MuC loader, the boot ROM tooling, the manifest compiler, a patched OpenOCD, and the example projects for each personality card — and the build instructions tell you to clone them.

Those links, including the git clone commands, have been repointed to copies under github.com/jksim, so that following the instructions does not depend on the original account surviving. The copies are standalone repositories rather than forks — pushed from verified local mirrors, with full history, independent of the upstream fork network. This is the one place the text has been changed rather than reproduced.

The originals were:

Preserved copy	Original
`jksim/nuttx`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/nuttx`
`jksim/muc-loader`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/muc-loader`
`jksim/bootrom-tools`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/bootrom-tools`
`jksim/manifesto`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/manifesto`
`jksim/openocd`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/openocd`
`jksim/mdk_examples`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/mdk_examples`
`jksim/mdkutility`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/mdkutility`
`jksim/mdkaudio`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/mdkaudio`
`jksim/mdkbattery`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/mdkbattery`
`jksim/mdkdisplay`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/mdkdisplay`
`jksim/mdksensor`	`MotorolaMobilityLLC/mdksensor`

The sample Android apps¶

The example pages tell you to install five sample apps — MDK Utility, Audio, Battery, Display and Sensor — from Google Play. All five listings now return 404, and the published binaries are not recoverable: no .apk was ever committed to the repositories or attached to a release, none appears in the site captures, and Google Play never served APKs from a URL a crawler could reach.

The source for all five is preserved in the repositories above, which is the substantive part. A rebuild would not reproduce the published apps though: they shipped as com.motomodsdev.* while the open-source projects build com.motorola.samples.*, so Motorola published from a configuration that is not in the public source.

The Play listings themselves were captured by the Wayback Machine and are kept in archive/play-store/ — descriptions, screenshots and version metadata for four of the five. The Play links in the documentation are left as they were written.

All five binaries were since recovered from a third-party mirror and are kept in archive/apks/, with each file's package, version, SHA-256 and signing certificate recorded. Four carry Motorola's release signing key; MDK Sensor carries the Android Studio debug key. They are version 1.00.003 and 1.00.002.

The apps the example pages link to are rebuilt from the preserved source at version 1.00.006 — the version the Play listing named as current, which no mirror had. They declare com.motorola.samples.*, as the open-source projects do, rather than the com.motomodsdev.* Motorola published, and they are debug-signed. They are not Motorola's builds; archive/apks/ holds those.

The SDK API reference¶

The Moto Mods SDK for Android API reference — the javadoc for com.motorola.mod, linked from every page under Android Software — was published from a subdirectory of Motorola's GitHub Pages site. It is preserved at jksim/motomods_sdk and served at jksim.github.io/motomods_sdk, with the files unchanged and at the same paths, so only the host differs from the URLs the documentation originally used.

Corrections¶

If you have a better capture of a missing diagram, spot a conversion error, or hold rights to this material and would like it amended or removed, please open an issue on the repository.

Attribution¶

The documentation is © Motorola Mobility LLC, reproduced for historical and educational reference. This project is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Motorola, Lenovo, or Google. Moto, Moto Mods and Moto Z are trademarks of their respective owners.