The fan is the feature: why this box can carry an i7

Compact industrial PCs usually buy their silence with a passive heatsink and then pay for it under load. The processor boosts for thirty seconds, reaches its thermal limit, and spends the rest of the shift at a lower clock — the datasheet number is real, it just is not what the machine runs at. The NANO-I takes the opposite decision: a dual-ball fan pulls air through the front slots, across the finned block and out through the perforated lid, which is why the same 178 mm chassis can carry anything from a Celeron to a 12th-generation Core i7.

Dual-ball bearings are specified for the same reason the case is aluminium rather than plastic: a sleeve-bearing fan is quiet for a year and then seizes. The result is a machine that holds its clock through a sustained load — vision inference, a database query, a nightly backup — instead of one that is fast on paper and throttled in the cabinet. If the site needs silence more than headroom, our fanless GW200 is the other answer, and we will tell you so rather than sell the wrong box.

One chassis, four CPU classes — choose the class, not the model number

The same enclosure is built around four processor families. Celeron J6412 for a gateway or a kiosk that only has to poll Modbus and push MQTT; the N-series — N97, N100, N150, N305 — for the same job with better efficiency and a longer support window; Core i3 and i5 for an HMI that also logs images; and Core i7 up to the 12th generation when the box has to run inference locally.

Choosing by model number is the usual mistake, because the model number tells you nothing about the job. A serial gateway is idle 95 % of the time and a J6412 is not the bottleneck; a vision station with two cameras will run out of memory bandwidth long before it runs out of cores. Send us the software and the number of cameras, tags or axes, and we will quote the smallest platform that holds the frame rate — which is usually cheaper than the one the customer asked for.

178.4 × 127 × 60 mm — small enough to live on a DIN rail

The unit measures 178.4 mm wide, 127 mm deep and 60 mm high, which is small enough to sit on a DIN rail beside the terminals it talks to and shallow enough to go behind a panel where a 4U chassis cannot. The front carries the ports an operator reaches for; the rear carries the ones that are wired once and then forgotten.

Small also means the airflow has to be designed rather than assumed: intake slots along the front edge, exhaust through the lid. Leave 50 mm of clear space above the lid and do not stack a second unit directly on top — a fan that is recirculating its own exhaust is a fan that is not cooling anything. The illuminated power switch and the HDD LED are on the front for the same practical reason: in a dark cabinet, a machine you can see is a machine you can service.

Two serial ports, six USB and dual GbE, and every port labelled

The front panel takes four USB 3.0 ports, two DB9 serial ports, an audio jack and the power switch. The rear takes two USB 2.0, two RJ45 Gigabit ports, HDMI, VGA, the DC 12 V input and two antenna holes for the Mini PCIe radio. Six USB ports in total, four of them 3.0 — a keyboard, a barcode scanner, a USB camera and a licence dongle, without a hub in the cabinet.

Dual GbE is the reason many buyers pick this form factor: one NIC on the machine network and one on the plant network, or one for the line and one for the office VPN, with no switch in between. The standard pair is Realtek RTL8111H with Wake-on-LAN; if the box is going to act as a firewall, a router or a VPN gateway, ask for the Intel I226 plus I219 option, because driver support and throughput under small packets are better.

VGA and HDMI together — because the panel on the machine is usually VGA

Two display outputs, VGA and HDMI, working synchronously or as an extended desktop. The VGA port is not a legacy afterthought: a large share of industrial panels, and almost every older CNC or injection-moulding controller display, is still VGA. HDMI carries no analogue signal, so an adapter in that position is a failure point rather than a substitute.

The combination gives an operator screen on HDMI and a repeat display or legacy panel on VGA from one unit — no add-in card, no second PC, no KVM. Tell us the resolution of both screens and whether they must mirror or extend, and we will confirm the configuration before the order.

Two storage positions and one radio slot — decide both at quotation

Storage is a 7-pin SATA 3.0 port at 6 Gbps plus an mSATA 3.0 slot. The usual split is an SSD on SATA for the operating system and the application, and an mSATA card for logs, images or a database — which keeps write wear off the system disk and lets the data disk be replaced without a reinstall. For a machine that logs camera images, that split is the difference between a three-year service life and an eighteen-month one.

One Mini PCIe slot takes either a WiFi module or a 4G module, with two antenna holes on the rear panel. It is one slot, so tell us which you need. If the site requires both, the second radio has to come from an external USB device or a different model, and we will say so before the quotation rather than after the delivery.

Desktop, wall bracket or DIN rail — the same four screws

The enclosure takes a wall bracket or a DIN-rail clip on the same four threaded inserts, and sits on a desk with rubber feet. That is what makes one part number usable across a control room, a machine frame and a terminal box: the drawing, the cut-out and the mounting pattern do not change when the installation does, so the second project is a repeat order instead of a re-design.

The bracket is optional and quoted separately, because most series customers either do not need it or want their own. Tell us the mounting position and whether the cabinet has a DIN rail, and the right hardware ships with the first unit rather than after the site visit.

Where the NANO-I is installed

Any project that needs a small x86 box with two network ports, two serial ports and enough compute to run the application locally:

· Smart factory — HMI hosts, cell controllers, Andon and OEE terminals

· Machine vision and edge AI — USB3 camera stations, code readers, in-line defect inference

· Rail transit — passenger information, ticketing and onboard gateway nodes

· Smart warehousing — WMS terminals, AGV and AMR controllers, dock displays

· Smart healthcare — imaging viewers, treatment-room terminals, nurse stations

· Energy and environment — solar and wind SCADA nodes, remote telemetry

What arrives in the carton

The box contains the NANO-I unit, a DC 12 V adapter, a power cord matched to the destination, a printed manual, a certificate of conformity, and the wall bracket where it was ordered. Series orders are packed in double-wall cartons with foam and, above a carton count, palletised.

Every unit is assembled, burned in and function-tested before packing: both NICs, all six USB ports, both serial ports at the protocol you specified, both display outputs and the watchdog. Tell us the destination country and we will ship the correct plug and the correct paperwork — the certificate of conformity travels with the unit because customs in several markets now ask for it.

Warranty, spares, and the part that matters in year three

Standard warranty is one year on the complete unit and three years on hardware. The fan is the only moving part in the machine, and it is a field-replaceable assembly rather than a soldered component — which is the reason a dual-ball bearing part is specified in the first place. A fan that can be changed in ten minutes with a screwdriver is the difference between a service call and a scrapped PC.

For series projects we hold spare units and advance-replacement stock, and the BIOS, the OS image and the mounting hardware stay the same across production batches, so a replacement drops into an existing installation. Send us the annual volume and your spare-parts expectation and we will put both into the quotation — it is cheaper to agree that now than to negotiate it after the first failure.

Specifications