EEVblog #458 - Industrial Computer

and yes it's another quick follow-up video from the all the auction stuff thought I'd take a look inside this ICP industrial computer because these things are bring back lots of memories I've designed lots of production test systems and I even believe I've SPECT in at one stage almost this exact machine and I believe the exact motherboard is a mama effort memory serves me correctly so these are you know rather interesting night things if you haven't seen them before so we'll take a look inside one of these industrial computers and this one in particular is the AEI Technology Corp rack 3000 GB - r21 /a 130 a and they've got more options than you can poke a stick out and there's many suppliers of these industrial computers or there were back in the day they're still err and I've these things are incredibly reliable but basically what sets them apart there are nine inch art standard rack of course this one looks like like a five rack unit high one and their full depth because take a look at the full length card in there and it's still got room for a second hard drive here plus the fans and filters we'll take a look at this one comes with a CD driver don't know if a hard-driving installed it's got a docking bay down there I don't have the key so I haven't been able to pull that out yet but basically what defines these things are the sheer number of slots I mean this one has 14 slots on it both a combination of them old school is a of course plus SAP PCI because this is the technology of the day it's fairly old and you'll notice that and there's a cross brace support in here and usually like the hard drives come with that rubber shock mounts and stuff like that I mean that might be you know commonplace these days on you know modern silent pcs and blah blah blah but you know having hard drive shock and vibration mounts was you know quite you know quite the innovation in these industrial industrial computers you never got them in the old you know they just weren't really an option in that old pcs nobody cared you know the slap together pcs but these industrial machines incredibly incredibly reliable I've had some of these working for greater than ten years continuous and that's on the same power supply this is an IAEA our braided power supply I'm not actually sure if they do it themselves or they get somebody else to make it but they're incredibly reliable and these things work out in the factory in the dust and the crap and the temperature extremes up and down you know from you know zero in winter overnight up to you know forty degree heat in the 45 degree heat in the middle of summer all that sort of stuff and all sorts of you know crap in the air and chemicals spilled over them and all sorts of stuff and they are ultra reliable this one has that two fans on the front we've got a filter down here which they do get clogged up a lot you do have to replace them and generally you don't typically get anything on the front because they're designed to just you know shut up like that and you know and not do anything I mean this one's got a couple of power and harddrive status LEDs some of them don't even have that so you know this one's usually is get a big all that's a momentary it's a momentary switch check it out that's not actually a proper clunking suite so they put a real well it's a real clunking switch but it's a it's not actually a switch in the main so that's that's unusual I don't remember having one with that before and basically what we got here is the main motherboard down here check out all the PCI slots nose is not piecing not the days of PCI Express folks this is a PCI tons of PCI slots why do you need fourteen slots well these industrial machines typically control industrial machinery and like you know I've almost fully kitted out these you'll have you know multi-channel data acquisition card you know National Instruments cards are pretty much you know standard fare in these kind of things you'll find shame I didn't get any National Instruments in this one this one looks like just a cereal machine all it's got as fitted out with a couple of extra serial port cards in here a comms card which I'll take out and we'll take the motherboard out and we'll have a closer look at that we've got a bar across the top to hold the cards in they usually hold those in with rubber mounts and stuff like that I'm really quite well designed and of course the chipset down in there as a PCI expansion chipset because the standard chipset on the motherboard down in there obviously can't drive you know like a 14 PCI slots in by the way yes there is a couple of ISA slots over there and that's what these motherboards are designed to do I mean you won't find these this configuration in a regular PC like there's an ISA slot at the towards the rear and then there's the PCI slot here and that's what the motherboard plugs into either PCI comes out here straight into the expansion chipset which then that drives the 14 PCI expansion slots so that's a fairly our standardized design in these industrial machines which you won't get in the more consumer one so I'll press stop or rip a few of the boards out and we'll have a look at the main board and the main board we've got in this thing is the rocky 4 7 8 6 zv - RS - 40 version 4 and that version Falls important folks because this board well this series board this rocky series board I remember these rocky series boards expect him in a few times myself but there's many many variants but this particular model our board was first first released in 2006 and since then they've actually they this one was version 4 point that was version 1 and this is version 4 last updated in 2010 to include the Intel 865 G northridge chip in here they just keep updating these boards keeping them compatible so that you can you know move your industrial stuff the same chazzy replace ones in the field stuff like that that's the advantage with buying these industrial computers I mean this thing just this one model of board went through many changes had a four year hour time frame and they'd all be fully compatible that's the advantage of this I mean you know look you know the six nine month are churn time in the regular PC industry I mean four years for this particular model is nothing you know in even even now you'll still be able to buy one they'll still manufacture it or if they don't sell the exact one though sell an upgraded version that's fully compatible and everything else to keep your legacy systems up and running because as I said you know it wasn't uncommon for in industrial places I've worked at they have the same machine working for ten years and then even if it fails you've still got to replace it with the same ball you don't replace the whole PC in the operating system you know we were still running Windows 3.1 one for you know um right up until just a you know four years ago or something like that um absolutely crazy so yeah these are industrial machines this one arm it's probably got like a seller on processor in it I don't know having that powered it up not going to take the heatsink off there it'll have all the gunk on the back of it but yeah these things use prime spec our parts I've never seen one of them fail due to a bad cap for example you know I sure you know they probably do in fact I'm sure they do eventually but you know even working in you know high-temperature industrial our factories at you know 40 degree ambient stuff like that they don't miss a beat they are absolutely fantastic design boards and got a couple of DIMM slots up here regular DIMM slots some people may not have even seen those before oh dear compact flash um Pat's lot because I'm often we wouldn't even have a hard drive sometimes you could boot these things from the compact flash there were I remember I think there were particular drivers where you could actually do that you could boot them from the compact flash slots and yeah it's got Ethernet building or look at this that's advanced a couple of um sadhas' down there why so modern backup battery of course and it's got a chipset to drive all the peripherals as you can see these are all serial cables coming out here so it's got you know serial parallel that they all have parallel ports all those legacy ports on them even modern ones still made and of course some regular IDE cables because this one has the hard drive and floppier both IDE interface so really fascinating board so this is a fairly modern one I think it's about 2010 in fact I might try and get a decode on that we've got a heatsink and bracket bar on the back there biased version 2.4 oh let me try and get a date code yeah some of the chips down there have date codes of practically the end of 2009 so basically this is a 2010 vintage board and this chipset the PCI chipset down here expansion chipset that's a late 2010 so uh yeah this thing is uh like you know only a couple of years old and well it certainly looks in that go-to condition there's certainly not much in terms of dust or anything else in here it's in very good Nick and then we have this 8 port serial card with the rj11 on it there you go and that's from a company called the Cyclades corporation it's an 8 YS aa board there you go a basis chipset never heard of it but yeah um eight port serial card needs so they're obviously doing lots of serial Cobb's with this thing it was its primary purpose pretty pretty much I didn't seem to do anything else except control hook up to a modem and control a whole bunch of serial devices and there's one thing you won't ever see on a PC motherboard nice big internal screw terminals look at that plus minus 12 volts and 5 volts for any custom internal stuff you wanted to build into these things and build we certainly did and this puppy has once again come from the national measurement is you'd be block at Linfield here in Sydney there you go last tested 2011 all right let's power it on see what we get here we go wait what to have to hold that on nope no well fail no there's no other power switch on the back no damn it what's going on so look yeah that's all plugged in to the board down there and the power supply let's fire the switch where's the wire looks like it's this one here which comes up here and goes across it's that ah here we go here we go hey there we go there so the switch doesn't go out of the power supply goes to the motherboard and then that PS on is labeled this wire so this one comes out and Oh dull I must have accidentally pulled that out when I was moving the card out there we go I think there's a yeah it's PS on is it there it is PS on standby bingo so that controls the standby pin on the power supply so if we plug that in we'll probably pair up or at least do something up yes look got some LEDs on the motherboard now and we did oh hello and the other thing is these things do make a bit of a racket the fans do have a lot of capacity oh I missed it missed it it's booting Linux oh there you go it's got Linux Enterprise Linux grub whatever grub is I'm sure all the Penguins are going insane now because this sucker has Linux on it and I think somebody mentioned that on the comments somebody mentioned that because like the cereal outs were labeled as pure Linux standard so they called it it is Linux and it's booting and it's a Red Hat variant so yeah it was labeled tty s for all the cereal ah focus TTY yes for all the serial ports and that is apparently the Linux staff not checking in root filesystem all six hundred and fifty five days without being checked checked force I got no keyboard plugged into this thing so I guess it's just going to keep going I have to turn it off and come back when it's done and here we go I think it's getting ready to do the business and they certainly haven't erased the hard drive because their measurement gov dot au it's all still there so uh hey nobody bothered they just don't put this thing doc ssin without erasing the harddrive and having a bit of um lunch I'm bit hungry whatever banana mm-hmm welcome to kudzu Wow okay does that mean that's like a fresh installation I've got a mouth plug then I don't have a keyboard plugged in so normal boot up will continue hmm nice banana folks starting ups model drivers are yeah this was all tied in to the UPS it's trying to load the UPS drivers there and it's not going off well it's going to download the drivers but there's no UPS attached so maybe it could take a while to time out perhaps well yeah there we go fail jeez taking a while to boot let me tell you windows 3.11 used to boot like in a couple of seconds it won these industrial computers it was absolutely brilliant and the good thing about windows 3.11 that we were running on some machines I've worked with is that in the middle of on these mobile T's mobile test start trolleys that went around the factory the operators could just unplug them and you wouldn't corrupt your file system at all windows 3.11 was great it just hey there we go welcome to Amber Lee dot I in measurement go you username please enter your username well I don't know I don't have a username because I have a keyboard attached dole more exactly repower this thing and have a look at that processor again because we missed it the keyboard and mouse didn't work by the way so it looks like I have to reboot anyways let's give it a go and let's have a look there we go we got an Intel Pentium 4 3 did ok with the were 500 Meg 512 Meg of RAM and yeah I'm not sure what the hard drive was missed it alright we're into the BIOS and it looks like we've got a fairly modern I guess um 7200 rpm 250 gig um hard drive not too bad at all our considering its industrial PC like this and we've got a a phoenix award bias and as we saw we had a but all the chipset goodness or the integrator peripherals woohoo PC health status and frequency voltage control speed spread spectrum now we don't want to spread the spectrum to do what EMC to pass our EMC compliance now no need to do that but here goes so I'm quit without saving yes and we'll boot up we've got keyboard the mouse didn't work maybe it has to detect it I don't know how much about Linux but yeah 512 Meg and a pentium forward to 3 gig so it's no slouch in terms of an industrial computer that's for sure so Enterprise Linux here do I went ill customer to all I'd standard al I don't know your custom sounds interesting and presumably it will detect the mouse now when it boots up because I plugged the mouse in before after it's a booted well force the following sound card has been removed from your system somebody took a do nothing sound card do nothing there we go a booting up alright let's try that again and by the way I just looked up eBay and somebody has this is XA my rocky model card for a 350 bucks on eBay buy it now absolute bargain so and you probably get someone who you know need a replacement board or something and they'll probably buy because the board is probably like thousand bucks or something I can't remember the exact prices or what they are these days but username I don't know Dave I can't even type anything no other master our bloody mouse doesn't work squeaking in the USB it didn't detect it bloody Linux but like the keyboard worked before why doesn't it work now unbelievable crap ah I give up so anyway there you have it there's a look at an ICP electronics ie I industrial computer with the well renowned rocky motherboard there used absolutely everywhere there are phenomenal and this one looks up to be a fairly new fairly modern any really good shape I like it so I don't know what I'm going to do with that I don't really have a need for it so probably go on eBay I guess and unless you got better ideas catch you next time you you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 134,511

Rating: 4.7834492 out of 5

Keywords: isp electronics, eie, industrial computer, teardown, rock motherboard, rocky, rack mount, linux, penguin, redhat, tutorial, how to

Id: QVqKi3HEccY

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2013