Design Your Own Industrial PC

随着越来越多的处理器制造商设计chips for specialized industrial uses, the greatest number of industrial applications remain well served by processors designed for high-end consumer applications, albeit when protected by a manufacturing-appropriate housing. The most recent example of this comes in the form of the Automation PC 910 from B&R Industrial Automation.

这款工业盒PC具有第三代Intel Core I技术。根据应用程序的不同，用户可以从i3，Core i5和Core i7 CPU中选择，最多四个内核以及新的QM77 Express芯片组。根据B＆R的说法，该处理器技术组合提供了“当前可用的最高工业计算机性能”。

Allowing for the selection of processors and housing types is not new to B&R, as all previous Automation PC models permit the user to mix and match CPU performance within different sized units. For example a quadcore CPU can be used in a single-slot housing or a single core Celeron can be used in a five-slot housing.

Other features of the Automation PC 910 include two ports for Gigabit Ethernet, one serial, one modular serial port (e.g., RS485 or CAN) and USB 3.0 ports, as well as a serial ATA-based CFast card, which replaces the use of CompactFlash.

Explaining B&R’s choice of embedded Intel architectures in its industrial PCs, Robert Muehlfellner, B&R’s director of automation technologies, says the use of consumer computing technologies “enables us to integrate capabilities that used to require a separate PC connected to a controller. We can now eliminate that additional PC running Windows because we can integrate functionalities like Web servers right on the control device.”

Muehlfellner says B&R prefers not to drive its own hardware technology standards so that it can reduce the need to develop proprietary solutions. “We want to focus our R&D on providing powerful, easy-to-use technologies,” he says. “We don't want to focus on designing our own hardware architectures.”

B&R’s use of embedded PC architectures allows the company to combine all automation functions, such as sequential logic control, I/O handling and visualization, in a single processor.

Muehlfellner补充说：“ OEM希望他们的计算机做更多的事情 - 提供更多数据，添加功能 - 但不希望将其传播到多个处理器上的复杂性。”