Welded-Steel Housing for Industrial Hardware

Amplicon's Industrial Computing group has released a range of industrial-grade cabinets suited to housing Amplicon's industrial rackmount computers, data communication and test equipment. Designed for the rigours of industrial-grade applications, the range is constructed from a rugged, welded-steel housing with mesh doors, to provide optimal airflow for the valuable industrial hardware contained within.

Available in a wide range of sizes to suit the hardware required, with heights up to 45U and depths to 1,200mm, the cabinets have the potential to allow up to 45U of rackmount equipment to be consolidated into a compact 600 x 600mm footprint.

With simplicity in mind the new range can be supplied as a fully integrated turnkey solution, supplied ready for use, or alternatively as a versatile starter kit, supplied with everything needed to get up and running with a customer's own cabinet integrations, including power distribution, cable management and fixings. The cabinets come complete with U-marked uprights to assist with these integrations.

Amplicon's cabinet integration service allows complete rackmount solutions to be professionally built against your own technical drawings and specification, allowing every last detail of the cabinet configuration and fitted hardware to be captured and easily replicated. The service allows an entire cabinet integration to be fully managed by Amplicon, consolidating and simplifying the supply chain to a single order and substantially reducing purchasing costs of more complex integration projects.

Embedded Computer for Factory Robots and Vehicles

Nexcom has expanded its range of fanless embedded systems with the launch of the NISE 2100A Series, designed for a host of industrial computing applications within extreme environmental conditions. Housed in a rugged aluminium chassis, NISE 2100A has been designed to operate in temperatures of between -20 to 70C. This feature enables NISE 2100A to function in the severe environmental conditions usually associated with factory automation, industrial automation or transportation.

It incorporates a 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 Dual Core processor with ICH8M PCH chipset. This advanced Intel-based technology boasts 50 per cent better performance than the previous generation of Atom N270 CPU, with only a small increase in power consumption. Using onboard DDR3 memory, NISE 2100A is capable of fulfilling mainstream market requirements for increased performance with lower system configuration costs.

The NISE 2100A is suitable for a wide variety of diverse applications and therefore is equipped with a multitude of I/O interfaces including Dual LAN, four RS-232 COM ports, two RS232/ 422/ 485 COM ports with 2.5 KV isolation protection, four USB 2.0, one VGA and GPIO port. In addition, for applications which require PCI expansion, a variant known as NISE 2110A is also available.

With a wide range of DC inputs, from 9 to 36V, as well as a built-in SIM-card holder and mini-PCIe socket, NISE 2100A series is suitable not only for industrial and factory automation but also for wireless communication, in-vehicle computer applications, transportation control systems, such as Kiosk, self-service machine and ticket machine.

USB-Capable Power Sensors

Rohde and Schwarz (RandS) has announced the NRP Z85 and NRP Z86, wideband sensors that measure power from 50 to 40GHz, suitable for microwave and radar development, maintenance and research. Instead of a base unit, the sensors are connected to a PC via a USB interface. This cost-efficient solution displays envelope power over a dynamic range of 47 to +20dBm. High-resolution pulse analysis is another exceptional feature.

Additionally, the RandS NRP Z85 and RandS NRP Z86 provide high-precision continuous-average measurements over the entire dynamic range from 60 to +20dBm. These performance characteristics make the sensors suitable for a variety of applications in the development and maintenance of microwave and radar systems as well as in the design and production of microwave components. The wideband power sensors can be operated from a PC via the RandS NRP Z4 USB adapter, or in combination with an RandS NRP/NRP2 power meter.

They can also be connected to any signal generator or virtually any signal, spectrum and network analyser from Rohde and Schwarz. Users can read the power measured from the DUT directly at the generator or analyser. A complete measurement solution comprising an RandS NRP Z85 or Z86 and an RandS NRP Z4 USB adapter is significantly more cost-effective than a conventional setup involving a power sensor and a power meter. With a video bandwidth of up to 30MHz and a sampling rate of 80MHz, the RandS NRP Z85 and Z86 are suited to analysing the time characteristics of modulated signals.

The rise time of less than 13ns enables easy measurement of the most frequently analysed pulse shapes. The power sensors can measure both peak power and average power over a defined time interval as well as perform statistical signal analysis (CCDF, PDF). With a measurement uncertainty of 0.18dB at 40GHz, these sensors offer good accuracy for continuous-average measurements. This combines with the sensors' other exceptional performance features to make them the market benchmark in peak power applications.

The power sensors' automatic pulse-analysis function provides peak power and average power measurements as well as detailed information on other important power and time characteristics of pulsed signals. These include, for example, pulse top level, pulse duration, pulse period, pulse duty cycle, and pulse rise and fall times. Using equivalent time sampling, the RandS NRP Z85 and Z86 can display pulsed signals with a very high time resolution.

This is done by sampling a series of consecutive waveforms of a pulsed signal. The measurements are time-shifted relative to one another, yielding a compacted sequence of samples, which over time are combined into a complete waveform. The new RandS NRP-Z85 and RandS NRP-Z86 wideband power sensors are now available from Rohde and Schwarz. The RandS NRP Z85 connects to the DUT via a 2.92 mm connector, the RandS NRP Z86 via a 2.4 mm connector.