Moto Mods Development Kit

The Moto Mods Development Kit was how anyone outside Motorola made a Mod. It pairs a Reference Moto Mod — a working Mod with the microcontroller, the high-speed bridge and the phone-side interface already on it — with a perforated board to solder your own circuit onto, and a cover to put round the result. With a Moto Z, that was the whole starting point for a prototype.

• A working Mod to build on

  The Reference Moto Mod carries the mechanical and electrical interface to the phone, the Moto Mod Microcontroller and the Moto High Speed Bridge, so the hard part of talking to a Moto Z was already done.

• 80 pins, brought to the surface

  The Perforated Board exposes the 80-pin developer connector as 26 rows of solder points at 2.54 mm pitch, with a power bus down each side — room to get an idea working without making a board first.

• Personality Cards as worked examples

  Motorola shipped audio, battery, display and temperature-sensor cards, each with open-source firmware and an Android app, as end-to-end examples of a finished Mod.

• Open firmware

  Mods ran NuttX and spoke Greybus, the protocol from Project Ara, over the same interface every shipping Mod used.