Editor's Pick: Dell Industrial PC Options

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

If you design embedded systems for vehicles, kiosks, automation, datacom and the like, you know procuring quality equipment in a timely manner can be a pain. You may also probably have to place huge minimum orders. Don't you wish you could just buy the computing power you need easily, jazz it up with your intellectual property and get your innovation marketed fast? That's what today's Pick of the Week is about.

The short of it is that Dell plans to make it easy to get the computing power for those IoT (Internet of Things) or industrial PC (IPC) devices you're developing. In other words, Dell intends to do for embedded systems and IoT equipment what it did for desktop PCs, notebooks, servers and engineering workstations: Give you the power to do whatever it is you do without a lot of hassle, with good customer service if needed and at a reasonable cost.

Dell's first purpose-built IPC products, the Embedded Box PC 3000 Series and PC 5000 Series are fanless, ruggedized systems designed to MIL-STD 810G specifications. “Fanless” is important for two reasons. One, fans have the knack of breaking. That can make for expensive field service, and it doesn't help burnish your 24/7 IoT device reliability claims. Two, they're noisy.

You can configure the Embedded Box PC series with Intel CPUs, storage devices, mounting options and even your own label. You have all sorts of wired and wireless I/O options like CAN bus, RS-232/RS-422, Gigabit Ethernet and wireless WAN. You can use them with or without a keyboard and monitor. They support Windows and Ubuntu, and Dell offers security and manageability options, support and deployment services. Best of all, you can order one unit or large volumes and get either quickly.

The Embedded Box PC 3000 is for space-constrained applications like traffic control and vehicles. It supports 4GB or 8GB of memory and uses Intel Atom processors, The Embedded Box PC 5000 provides performance and I/O scalability. It has two PCI/PCIe card slots and high-bandwidth for use cases like multiple high-definition video streaming and high-frequency sensor data sources. It uses Intel Celeron, Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs and supports up to 16 GB of memory.

Hit today's Pick of the Week link to learn more about the Embedded Box PC 3000 Series and PC 5000 Series. This sounds like the start of something awfully good.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering