Kontron (Germany) has expanded its panel PC series with Micro Client 3 and OmniClient. The Micro Client 3 series are for monitoring and controlling individual production lines. The OmniClient series is designed for supervising and managing complete manufacturing facilities. The products have edgeless displays. Both series are CAN connectable.
THE MICRO CLIENT 3 SERIES ARE BASED on Intel’s D2550 Atom processor with two 1,86-GHz cores and have up to 4-GiB DDR3 memory. The family is equipped with a 15,6-inch display. In the future, 10-inch and 17-inch displays will be provided. The panel PC supports wireless LAN communication. It also features two 1-Gbit/s Ethernet lines, two USB-3.0 ports and two USB-2.0 ports, one EIA-232 port, a graphical output (DVI, DP) for a secondary display, and several interfaces such as RFID (radio frequency identification). The device offers a single mini-PCI-e (peripheral component interconnect express) socket.
The OmniClient series are based on Intel’s Core i5/i7 processors, which have up to four 2,7-GHz cores and have up to 16-GiB DDR3 memory. The family can be scaled from 15,6-inch to 22-inch displays. It provides an optional CAN interface, there is no support for higher-layer protocols such as CANopen. The device features also three 1-Gbit/s Ethernet lines, two additional display ports, DVI-I, and six USB-2.0 ports. Optionally, it is equipped with 18 I/Os as well as two serial ports that can be configured as EIA-232/485/422. The computer provides wireless LAN, Bluetooth, and RFID. It comes with two mini-PCIe and one PCIe expansion slot .The panel integrates up to two SATA hard-drives.
External flash memory units can be linked to both series through the mSATA connector. Data storage media may be connected using a SATA connector suitable for 2,5-inch units. Besides being fitted with a projected widescreen made of glass, the Micro Client 3 is also being produced in a 4:3 format with resistive touch technology for display sizes 10,4-inch to 17-inch. To ensure reliability, the company claims to employ only quality components, such as gold capacitors used as BIOS-level voltage buffers and LED backlighting with a service life of at least 50 000 hours. Each front panel is IP65-rated.
The panel PCs will become employed as shop-floor systems in processing industries such as the chemicals and pharmaceutical sectors, food and beverages, and the power sector, plus sophisticated machines and plants or factories and facility management. The two lines of panel PCs allows the users to rotate and zoom complex visualizations with two fingers, or swipe to scroll through lists of data. The screen format increases the size of the display by one-third, allowing more space for gesture control and visualization. The panel PCs in a portrait format allows for a complete virtual keyboard to be shown in the lower part of the screen. Therefore, there is no need for a keyboard
[info] emea.kontron.com [/info]