Re: [foxboro] "Industrial PC" recommendations

Hi Corey,
We considered industrial PC's  also, but for budget reasons we installed 
regular,cheap Dell PC's in Rittal cabinets in our production area. The 
cabinets are closed with the TFT monitor behind a glass door, We keep the 
cabinets pressurized to keep dust out and provide extra cooling. Keyboards 
are NSI membrane keyboards with trackballs. This setup has been working 
for about 5 years and as long as the forced cooling works, we do not have 
any problems with the (cheap) PC's. PC's are connected to the LAN, 
configured with never expires password, exceed/DM and off course internet 
acces and  e mail is disabled.
the rittal cabinets are located in a very dusty, warm and tacky production 
environment right next to the production units.
We thought we would have to replace the pc's regularly, but until now this 
has not been the case. The dell's are still functioning fine and to be 
honest they are never serviced....I opened one some time ago to check on 
dust build up, and there was less dust than in an office PC..... Even the 
keyboards are still the first ones after all these rough years. i replaced 
2 of them because they were cleaned with strong detergent soap, the 
membrane keyboard itself was ok, but the integrated trackbal didn't work 
anymore, if they had use the right product for the cleaning they would 
still be ok.

So if you are going to install them in a control room I don't see why they 
have to be industrial PC's......

Rgds,

Dirk Pauwels - DCS/MOC coordinator 
Engineering dept.
Hexion Specialty Chemicals
E mail: dirk.pauwels@xxxxxxxxxx
T.  +32.(0)3.570.95.97
F.  +32.(0)3.570.16.09
Mob. +32.(0)497.428.300



Corey R Clingo <corey.clingo@xxxxxxxx> 
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14/04/2009 19:12
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Subject
[foxboro] "Industrial PC" recommendations






Hi list,
I'm looking for any recommendations for so-called "industrial PCs".  My 
requirements are as follows:


* Powerful enough to run XP decently (but see below)
* Fanless (and can thermally tolerate some dust build-up on the exterior)
* Can drive two monitors at 1280x1024 each
* Open-source friendly (hardware not too cutting-edge, supported by Linux 
or a *BSD)
* Ethernet and a couple USB ports
* Standard motherboard (microATX or miniITX) and expansion (PCI/PCI-E)

Nice to have:

* Can boot from and use CF card or hard disk (though I guess I could get a 

SSD module if there's no CF slot)
* Keyboardless/mouseless boot ability
* Can take 2GB or more of RAM (I don't foresee needing more than 512MB or 
so, but see Windows 7 comment below).


I plan to use these to run static/dedicated DMs/AMs and maybe alarm 
loggers.  I'm going to avoid Windows on the ones I can, but if I find I 
need XP for something, I want to be able to run it.  [I guess I really 
ought to be asking for hardware that will run Windows 7, but we'll be with 

XP for another 4 or 5 years here at least.]


These will be in a (dusty) control room so I don;t need classified-area 
compatibility.


Any experiences/pointers will be appreciated.


Thanks,
Corey Clingo
BASF Corp.

 
 
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