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Visual display system keeps its cool

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Sep 9, 2005

Long experience of custom designing small industrial computers that keep their cool won an order for Sight Systems from digital signage specialist, Inspiration Matters.

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

The system, known as Inspired Signage, is a black box (hardware and 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 1275 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 antishock mounted and positioned in line with the cooling airstream.

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.