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Bespoke visual display system keeps its cool

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Oct 11, 2004

Long experience of custom designing small industrial computers that keep their cool won an order to provide a leading digital signage specialist with a point-of-use/sale visual display system.

Long experience of custom designing small industrial computers that keep their cool won an order for Sight Systems of Worthing to provide a leading digital signage specialist with a point-of-use/sale visual display system offering almost ten times the quality of Pal video systems.

The system is a black box (hardware plus software) solution for programme creation, delivery and management for a wide variety of communications platforms such as retailing, exhibitions, travel etc.

Clients can create and manage dynamic 4:3 and 16:9 film-quality productions with text, graphics, animation and video.

These can be broadcast via corporate intranet or the Internet to a network of screens and, with suitable data input, could be controlled by determiners such as stock levels or traffic density, for example.

Sight Systems' task was to produce a small, robust, hardware package suitable for wall or under-desk mounting.

The design brief also called for low running temperature and low noise.

Two 60 x 60 x 25mm low noise fans on specially designed antivibration mountings enhanced natural convection ventilation flow through the chassis top and bottom grid work of CE compliant 3mm holes.

Positioned at the top of the unit, these fans pull 1274 litre/min of air through the chassis.

In addition, a special baffle was designed to duct airflow to cool the hot-running, high specification graphics card.

The hard disk drive was also anti-shock mounted and positioned in line with the cooling air stream.

The fans fitted as standard to the 300W power supply were disconnected and low-noise Papst fans with greater airflow were fitted.

A micro ATX motherboard with onboard LAN, Audio and VGA was used and as only one PCI was required, the adjacent space was used for the remainder of the electronics.

The black box solution provided is complete with all required software.

Computer literate personnel are not a necessity to operate the system and, using a special composer interface provided by the vendor, the user can quickly learn to create new output and manage schedules with minimal training.