Bespoke rack PCs designed to meet the demands of industrial environments

Impulse Embedded's senior production technician, Andy Shaw, recently built a VELA Rack PC designed to meet the rigorous demands of industrial environments. The company's workshop team builds such powerful bespoke computers to customers' exacting specifications to produce fully robust computers that can readily integrate into any pre-existing system.

The VELA, powered by Advantech, is the company's flagship series for industrial computing. It is built, configured, tested, and shipped from its facility in Newcastle-under-Lyme and is available in rack and tower formats. Because it keeps all the component parts in stock, the series can ship anywhere within the UK with a quick turnaround.

In this recent order for an ongoing project with a fixed BOM, the company integrated carefully chosen components to fulfil the customer's demands for their application. The rack PC has an Intel Core i5-10500TE 2.3GHz processor and an Intel-embedded CPU that guarantees availability for at least seven years from the release date, which is extremely important for this customer to save on software redevelopment costs.

The chassis has a sleek, space-saving design with a 19" 2U rack-mount chassis that houses the ATX motherboard, optimising the use of valuable rack space and one slim optical drive bay, which permits the customer to load application-specific software before deployment into the field, improving the efficiency of the device. It also offers two 3.5" hot-swap drive trays, making the drives easy to replace or upgrade without losing valuable productivity time.

Multiple integrated high CFM fans within the chassis further fortify the device's durability. The fans stop overheating during extended operating periods and minimise downtime in harsh environments with high temperatures.