is written at the front
Recently, an industrial control machine has become an "Internet celebrity" in the industry. This is the online IPC-900 series dedicated to industrial control machine released by Advantech in June 2018.
Why does this industrial control function become a "Internet celebrity"? Will the quality of the machines specially provided online in
differ in quality?
With these questions, the editor conducted an unboxing review of this industrial control machine.
It is understood that Advantech IPC-900 series industrial control machines have three models, namely the economical IPC-900, the cost-effective IPC-940, and the compact and high-performance IPC-941. What I got this time is IPC-941. The following will be evaluated from three aspects: appearance packaging, internal structure and boot test.
Appearance Packaging
IPC-941 is packaged in a typical industrial category square carton. If you open the packaging, you can see the power cord and a box containing instructions, wall hanging strips, and cylindrical rubber shock absorbing pads. The plastic foam and carton are very tight, with good shock resistance and good suitable for long-distance transportation.
Take out the machine and remove the plastic film outside the chassis. The super high appearance of IPC-941 suddenly refreshes the editor's understanding of industrial control machines. The IPC-941 in front of me is no longer a traditional industrial control machine image, and is completely comparable to commercial brand computers in terms of appearance. The main body of the whole machine is frosted black, paired with metallic silver, simple and atmospheric, and the corners of the chassis are also very smooth and well-made. The whole machine looks very textured at first glance.
After placing it flat, you can see that this is a standard 4U chassis, but it is made in a short style in length, with a size of only 35cm, making this industrial control machine suitable for smaller installation space. There are 2 handles on the front panel to facilitate lifting the entire machine. When the editor mentioned the entire machine, he felt heavy, which was much heavier than the average size of commercial machines. It can be seen that the material selection of this industrial control machine is still very guaranteed. After actual weighing by the editor, the weight of this IPC-941 prototype is 12 kg.
Let’s take a closer look at the front panel of this industrial control machine. The entire front panel is designed in a very simple manner, without any interfaces, and a whole black hollow panel in the middle. The large-area ventilation hole design can ensure the heat dissipation requirements of the entire machine. The panel is designed with a panel lock with a key and a hand knob and 6 small LED indicators. The lower right corner is paired with the classic Advantech logo "ADVANTECH", which highlights the power of the brand.
Switch the panel key to open the entire front panel. On the back of the panel is an air filter. The industrial control machine often works in harsh environments, so this filter can prevent dust in the environment from entering the interior of the industrial control machine. Moreover, this filter can be removed and cleaned at will, which is crucial for future maintenance.
On the panel inside, in addition to the 6 status indicators, there are also power switch buttons, system restart buttons and alarm restart buttons. If you want to operate these 3 buttons, you can only get the panel key, so that the safety of the industrial control machine is more guaranteed. There are also two USB3.0 ports designed in the upper left corner of this panel, which can be used for daily external USB drives.
On this panel, you can see two hand-tight screws, which can also be unscrewed. After unscrewing, there are two cooling fans. The purpose of this design is to easily clean the fan dust and replace the fan without opening the chassis. Isn’t this also very user-friendly?
After looking at the front panel, let’s take a look at the back of the entire machine. The layout on the back is very clear at first glance, and it is divided into four areas: power supply, interface, heat dissipation air outlet and expansion card. The interface has 6 USB ports, 1 serial port , 2 DVI monitor ports, 2 network ports, 1 audio port, and 7 expansion card slots. In the middle position, you can also see that 4 serial ports and 1 parallel port baffle are reserved on the chassis for future expansion. Overall, the interface of this IPC-941 machine is sufficient to meet general field applications.The more
interfaces are also the advantage of this industrial control machine. When multiple serial ports are needed, the serial port line can be extracted from the motherboard reserved interface, and the reserved serial port position is derived. There is no need to occupy the valuable PCIPCIE expansion slot, which can be adapted to applications in more occasions.
Internal structure
For industrial control machines, the high-value appearance is the icing on the cake. It depends on your strength or you have to open the chassis to see if there is "content" inside. Next, let’s open the chassis and take a look at the internal structure.
If you want to open the upper cover of IPC-941's chassis, you only need to remove one screw, unscrew the two hand-tight screws by hand, and then pull the upper cover outward. It is very convenient to operate. After opening the upper cover, you can find that the entire chassis is rectangular, with a very compact internal structure and almost no wasted space. In the middle of the chassis is a common steel plate press on the industrial control machine. This press can not only strengthen the rigidity of the chassis, but also fix various expansion cards through rubber pads. The IPC-941 press and rubber foot pads can prevent damage caused by impact or vibration of the card, which is very important for the reliability of the industrial control machine.
In order to see more clearly, we took off the press and saw the important components inside this machine. After removing the pressing strip, press and hold the box frames on the front, back, or left and right sides. No matter how hard the editor stretches and twists it hard, there is no deformation or shaking. It seems that the steel plate of the chassis is as strong as ever in the material.
First look at the heat dissipation of the entire machine. The room temperature air inlets from the fan on the front panel, then passes through the motherboard, memory, CPU, expansion card, graphics card, etc., and finally discharges from the air outlet on the back. The entire air duct has been professionally designed, with positive pressure ventilation, reasonable wind direction and efficient heat dissipation.
This IPC-941 prototype motherboard is Advantech's AIMB-785 industrial-grade motherboard. It has neat design, reasonable layout, clear wiring and excellent workmanship. All solid-state capacitors can ensure high-temperature environment use. If the editor is one month later, he can get an industrial-grade motherboard that supports the 8th generation Coffee Lake CPU for trial testing. He just regrets that he is moving too fast... The
memory part has 4 DIMM slots, which supports up to 64G DDR4 memory, and the 4GB memory provided by the prototype.
has 3 PCIs, 3 PCIe x 4, and 1 PCIe x 16 slot on the motherboard inside the chassis, which also meets the card needs of traditional PCI motion control cards, I/O cards, serial port cards, high-speed image acquisition cards, graphics cards, etc. The editor also found that there is a USB TypeA interface, which is very cleverly designed. If you insert a dongle here, you no longer have to worry about being accidentally pulled away.
Let’s take a look at the hard disk of this mockup. First of all, we can see that the hard drive rack can hold 2 3.5-inch hard drives, and the 4 fixing screws of the chassis have rubber gaskets, which can greatly reduce the vibration of the hard drive. This is also very important for the reliability of the industrial control machine. Remove the hard drive holder and you can see that the prototype uses a 1TB SATA hard drive.
Let’s take a look at the very important component in the industrial control machine - the power supply. Although power supply is very common, its performance often has a great impact on the stability and reliability of the industrial control machine. We see that the power supply of this IPC-941 prototype is paired with a 300W industrial power supply with Advantech LOGO, which can be guaranteed. The input voltage of this power supply can withstand a wide voltage of 100-240V and is equipped with an 80PLUS certification mark, indicating that the conversion efficiency can reach more than 80%. In addition, there are CCC, CE, FCC, TUV, UL, CB, KC and other certifications.
Looking around the entire chassis, the editor suddenly found that there was a circuit board next to the air inlet fan. There were many wires connected to this circuit board from the CPU fan and the motherboard. At the same time, there were wires connected to the indicator lights on the front panel. It seemed that this was Advantech's intelligent management module.
According to the editor, this IPC-941 is a high-end model dedicated to Advantech's online IPC-900 series, so it has this intelligent module that can monitor the CPU fan speed, temperature, cooling fan speed, chassis cover opening status, etc. Once an abnormality is found, in addition to the alarm on the LED lights on the front panel, remote monitoring can also be achieved through Advantech's WISE-PaaS software. This is exactly in line with the current intelligent manufacturing needs of the Internet of Things in the current era, and the industrial control machine will no longer become a "dark box" in the entire system!
Start-up test
After reading the appearance and internal structure of IPC-941, the editor will start-up test below.
After connecting to the monitor and power supply, press the power button on the lower panel and the machine started with a "buzz". Just when the editor was surprised by the noise of the fan, the machine suddenly became silent for about 2 seconds, leaving only a small buzzing sound, almost equivalent to the noise of a desktop computer used in daily offices. It seems that the noise management of IPC-941 has also been optimized.
From the editor pressing the power button to the computer starting, it takes 11 seconds in total, and the startup speed is still very fast. After booting, I saw some main parameters of this IPC-941: Windows 7 Professional Operating System, i3 CPU, 4GB of memory.
On this prototype, Advantech's SUSI Demo Tool is already installed. It can collect internal information of the machine through the intelligent management module, including motherboard voltage, CPU temperature, chassis internal temperature, CPU fan speed and cooling fan speed. Of course, this information can also be uploaded to the cloud or accessed remotely through Advantech's WISE-PaaS.
In order to test the function of the smart module, the editor opened the upper cover of the chassis, found the temperature sensor in the chassis, pinched the sensor with his hand, and found that the noise of the cooling fan suddenly increased, and the speed also accelerated, proving that this smart module can quickly adjust the fan speed according to the ambient temperature, and plays an intelligent control role.
Evaluation Summary
After a one-day evaluation and testing, the editor is quite satisfied with this IPC-941, especially the stunning appearance, consistent Advantech quality and intelligent management module impressed me particularly. Although the IPC-941 is an industrial control machine specially supplied by Advantech, it is no different from the offline model in terms of materials and quality. Through this review, the editor's concerns about the quality of online industrial control machines are eliminated, which is also the original intention of the editor to conduct unboxing evaluation.
Of course, since the IPC-900 series of key components such as chassis, CPU, motherboard, etc. can be flexibly configured through online selection, the prototypes evaluated this time do not represent the highest performance of IPC-941. Users can use more advanced hardware configurations to achieve better performance, such as choosing the latest industrial motherboard and CPU of the 8th generation Coffee Lake.
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