And yes, it's another quick follow-up video from the Uh all the auction stuff thought I'd take a look inside this uh ICP industrial computer cuz these things. uh, bring back lots of memories, I've designed lots of production test systems and uh I even believe I've specked in at one stage. uh, almost this exact machine. uh and it I believe the exact motherboard if M if memory serves me correctly.

So uh, these are you know, uh, rather interesting uh things if you haven't uh, seen them before. So we'll take a look inside one of these industrial computers and this one in particular is the II technology Corp Rack 3000, Gb- R21 a 130a and they've got more options than you can poke a stick at. And there's many um supplies of these industrial computers. or they were, uh, back in the day there still are and uh, I've These things are incredibly reliable.

but basically what sets them apart? they're a 9 inch, uh, standard rack. Of course this one looks like like a five rack unit. uh High one and uh, their full depth cuz take a look at the uh full length card in there and it's still got room for a second hard drive here. Um, plus the fans and filters.

we'll take a look at. This one comes with a CD drive I don't know if a hard drive installed. it's got a docking uh Bay down there I don't have the key so I'm uh, haven't been able to pull that out yet. But basically what defines these things are the the sheer number of slots.

I mean this one has 14 uh slots on it. both a combination of, um, old school, uh Isa of course. plus uh PCI because this is the uh technology of the day. it's fairly old and uh, you'll notice that and there's a cross brace support in here.

And usually like the hard drives come with rubber, uh, shock mounts and stuff like that I Mean that might be, you know Common place these days on, you know, modern silent PCS and blah blah blah. but uh, you know, having hard drive shock and vibration mounts was, you know, uh, quite. You know, quite the innovation in these, uh, industrial, uh, industrial computers. You never got them in the old, um, you know, they just weren't really an option in the old.

PCS Nobody cared. You know the SLA together. PCS But these industrial machines? Incredibly incredibly reliable. I've had some of these work in for greater than 10 years continuous and that's on the same power supply.

This is an Iei branded power supply. I'm not actually sure if they, uh, do it themselves or they get somebody else to make it, but they're incredibly reliable and these things work out in the factory, in the dust and the crap and the temperature extremes up and down. You know, from you know, zero in Winter overnight, up to you know, 40 heat in 45 heat in the middle of summer, all that sort of stuff and all sorts of you know, um, crap in the air and chemicals spilled over them and all sorts of stuff. And they are Ultra reliable.

This one has two fans on the front. We've got a uh filter down here, which, uh, they do get clogged up, uh, a lot. You do have to replace them and generally, um, you don't typically get, um anything on the front because they're designed to just, you know, shut up like that and uh, you know and not do anything I mean this one's got a couple of power and hard drive status leads some of them. uh, don't even have that So you know this one's usually you get a big oh, that's a momentary, it's a momentary switch.

Check it out. That's not actually a proper clunking switch. So they put a real well, it's a real clunking switch. but it's uh, it's not actually switch in the main, so that's that's unusual I don't remember having one with that before and basically what we're got here is the main motherboard down here.

Check out all the uh PCI slots. No, this is not PC not the days of PCI Express Folks, this is uh, PCI tons of PCI slots. Why do you need 14 slots? Well, these industrial machines typically, uh, control industrial machinery and like you know, I've almost fully kitted out these. you'll have you know.

multi- Channel Data acquisition cards, you know National Instruments cards are pretty much, uh, you know, standard fair in these uh, kind of things you'll find shame. I didn't get any National Instruments cards in this one. This one looks like just a Serial machine. All it's got is fitted out with a couple of extra serial Port cards in here, a comm's card which I'll take out and and we'll take the motherboard out and we'll have a closer look at that.

We've got a um a uh a bar across the top to hold the Uh cards in. They usually hold those in with rubber mounts and stuff like that. um, really quite welld designed. and of course the Uh chipset down in there as a PCI uh expansion chipset because the uh standard chips set on the motherboard down in there obviously can't drive.

you know, like a 14 PCI slots. And by the way, yes, there is a couple of Isa slots over there and that's what these motherboards are designed to do. I mean you won't find these this configuration in a regular Pc. like there's an Isa slot at the towards the rear and then there's the PCI slot here and that's what the motherboard uh plugs into.

the PCI comes out here straight into the uh Expans chipset which then drives the 14 uh PCI expansion slot. So um, that's a fairly uh, standardized design in these industrial machines which you won't get in the more consumer ones. So uh, I'll press stop I'll rip a few of the boards out and uh, we'll have a look at the main board and the main board we've got in this thing is the Rocky 4786 Ev- Rs-4 version 4 and that version 4 is in important folks cuz this board. Well this series board.

This Rocky series board I Remember these Rocky series boards I've speced them in a few times myself, but there's many, many variants. Um, but this particular model uh board was first, um, first, Uh released in 2006 and uh, since then they've actually um, they this one was uh, version 4. that was version one and this is version 4 last updated in 2010 to include the Um Intel 865g Northbridge chip in here. They just keep updating these boards, keeping them compatible so that you can, uh, you know, move your industrial stuff, keep the same shazzy, uh, replace ones in the field stuff like that.

That's the advantage with buying these industrial computers. I mean this thing. Just this one model of board went through. uh, many changes, had a four-year art time frame and they'd all be fully uh compatible.

That's the advantage of this. I Mean you know. Look, you know the 6 n month uh, churn time in the regular Pc industry I mean four years for this particular model is nothing you know In even even now, you'll still be able to, uh, buy one, they'll still manufacture it. or if they don't sell the exact one, they'll sell an upgraded version that's fully compatible.

and everything else to. uh, keep your legacy systems up and running cuz as I said, you know it wasn't uncommon. um for uh, in industrial places I've worked out to have the same machine working for 10 years and then even if it fails, you've still got to replace it with the same board. You don't want to replace the whole PC and the operating system, you know we will still running Windows 3.11 for you know, um, right up until just you know, 4 years ago or something like that.

Um, absolutely crazy. So yeah, these are industrial machines. This one. um, it's probably got like a Celeron uh processor in it I Don't know.

Haven't uh powered it up? Not going to take the uh heat sink off there. it'll have all the uh Gunk on the back of of it. But yeah, these things use primes. Speec.

uh Parts I've never seen one of them fail due to a bad cap. uh, for example, you know I'm sure you know they probably do. In fact, I'm sure they do, uh eventually. but you know, even working in uh, you know, high temperature industrial factories at you know, 40 ambient stuff like that, they don't miss a beat.

They are absolutely fantastic. uh design boards and got a couple of dim uh slots up here. regular slots. some people may not have even seen those before.

Oh dear. Compact Flash. um slot because um often, uh, we wouldn't even have a hard drive. Sometimes you could, um, boot these things from the uh.

compact flash. There were I remember I think there were particular drivers where you could actually, uh, do that. You could boot them from the uh, Compact flash slots and uh yeah, it's got Ethernet build in. Oh, look at this.

that's Advanced couple of um SAS down there W So modern, uh. backup battery of course. and uh, it's got a chipset to drive all the peripherals. As you can see, these are all serial cables coming out here.

so it's got, you know, serial Paral: they all have parallel ports. All those Legacy uh ports on them, even modern ones. uh, still made and of course um, uh, regular IDE um cables because this one has the hard drive and floppy are both ID uh. Interface: so uh, really fascinating board.

So this is a fairly mod one. I think it's about 2010. In fact, I might try and get a date code on that. We got a heat sink um, and uh, bracket bar on the back there bias Version 2.4 um oh let me try and get a date code.

Yeah, some of the chips down there have uh, date codes of, uh, practically the end of 2009. So uh, basically this is a 2010, uh, vintage board and uh, this chipset. Uh, the PCI chipset down here. uh, expansion chip set.

That's uh, late 2010, So uh yeah. this thing is, uh, like you know, only a couple of years old and well, it certainly looks in that good a condition. There's certainly not much in terms of dust or anything else in here. It's in very good nick.

And then we have this eight Port serial card with the RJ 11s on it. There you go. and that's from a company called the Cyclades Corporation. It's an 8ys, uh board.

There you go, basis chipset. Never heard of it, but there you go. Um, eight Port serial card. Neat.

So they're obviously doing lots of, uh, serial coms with this thing. It was its primary purpose. Pretty pretty much didn't seem to do anything else except uh, control. hook up to modem and control a whole bunch of Serial devices.

And there's one thing you won't ever see on a PC motherboard. Nice big internal screw terminals. Look at that. Plusus: 12 V and 5 Vols for any custom internal stuff you wanted to build into these things and build.

We certainly did. And this puppy has once again come from the national measurement Institute B Block at Uh Lynfield here in Sydney There you go. Last tested 2011. All right, let's power it on and see what we get here.

We go. Wait, what do I have to hold that on? No, no whoa, Fail no. there's no other power switch on the back. No damn it, what's going on, let's have a look there that's all plugged into to the board down there from the power supply.

let's follow the switch. where's the wire? Looks like like it's this one here which comes up here and goes across it's that. Ah, here we go here we go. Hey there we go.

So the switch doesn't go over the power supply goes to the motherboard and then that PS on is labeled this wire. So this one comes out and oh do I must have accidentally pulled that out when I uh was moving the card out. there we go I think there's a yeah, it's PS1 Is it there? it is PS on standby. Bingo! So that controls the standby pin on the power supply so if we plug that in, it'll probably power up or at least do something.

Oh yes, look got some LEDs on the motherboard now and uh oh we did. oh hello and um. the other thing is these things do uh, make a bit of a racket. The fans do have a a lot of capacity.

oh oh oh oh oh I missed it. missed it. it's booting Linux oh there you go. it's got Linux Enterprise Linux grub.

whatever grub is. I'm sure all the penguins are uh going insane now cuz this sucker has Linux on it and I think somebody mentioned that on the Uh comments. Somebody mentioned that because like the Um serial outs were labeled um as per a Linux Uh standard so they called it it is Linux and it's booing and it's a Red Hat Um variant. so uh yeah, it was labeled uh TTY s um for all the uh serial oh Focus TTY Ys for all the serial ports and that is apparently the Linux uh stuff.

oh checkin root file system oh 655 days without being checked checked forced I got no keyboard plugged into this thing so I guess it's just going to uh, keep going I have to turn it off and uh, come back when it's done and here we go I think it's uh, getting ready to do the business and uh, they certainly haven't erased the uh hard drive cuz they measurement. goo. Au it's all still there. so uh, they nobody bothered.

they just uh, put this thing to auction without uh, erasing the hard drive and having a bit of um, lunch I'm a bit hungry. got to have a banana. Welcome to Kadu! ah okay, does that do that mean that's like a fresh installation I've got a mouse plugged in I don't have a keyboard plugged in so normal boot up. We'll continue h nice Banana Folks starting UPS Model drivers Oh yeah, this was all tied into the UPS it's trying to load the Uh UPS drivers there and uh, it's uh, not going to.

uh, well, it's going to load the drivers but there's no UPS attached so maybe it could take a while to. time out. Perhaps. Oh yeah, there we go.

Failed. Jeez. Taking a while to boot. Let me tell you, Windows 3.11 used to boot like in a couple of seconds on on these industrial computers.

It was absolutely brilliant. And the good thing about Windows 3.11 that we were running on uh, some machines I've worked with is that in the middle of on these mobile test uh mobile test, uh trolleys that went around the the Factory The Operators could just unplug them and you wouldn't corrupt your file system at all. Windows 3.11 was great. It just hey there we go.

Welcome to Amber. Measurement. goo. Au Username: Please enter your username.

oh I don't know I don't have a username cuz I don't have a keyboard attached? Do I actually repower this thing and have a look at that processor again cuz we missed it. Um, the keyboard and mouse didn't work by the way. so it looks like I have to reboot anyway. So let's give it a go and let's have a look There we go.

We got an Intel Penum 43 gig. okay with 500 Meg 512 Meg of RAM and yeah, not sure what the hard drive was. Missed it all right. We're into the bias and looks like we've got a fairly modern I guess um 7200 RPM uh 250 gig.

um hard drive. Not too bad at all. Uh, considering this industrial uh PC like this and uh, we've got a an A Phoenix award bias and as we saw we had a uh got all the chips set goodness. All the integrated peripherals Woohoo! PC health status and frequency voltage control SP spread Spectrum nah we don't want to uh spread the Spectrum to do EMC uh to pass out EMC Compliance Nah, no need to do that.

but there you go. So um, quit without saving? yes and we'll uh boot up. We've got keyboard. the mouse didn't work.

Maybe it has to detect it I don't know much about Linux but uh yeah. 512 uh Meg and a Pentium 4 at 3 gig. So it's no slouch in terms of an industrial computer that's for sure. So Enterprise Linux e do I want e custom or do I want standard? E I don't know e custom sounds interesting and uh, presumably it will detect the mouse now when it boots up cuz I plugged the mouse in before after it's uh, booted or Force oh the following sound card has been removed from your system.

Somebody took a do nothing sound card. Do nothing. There we go, we're booting up all right. let's try that again.

And by the way, I just looked at eBay and somebody has this exact same uh Rocky uh model card for 350 bucks on eBay Buy It Now Absolute bargain. So and probably get someone who will you know need a replacement board or something and they'll probably buy it cuz the board is probably like 1,000 bucks or something. I Can't remember the exact prices or what they are these days, but username I don't know Dave Oh I can't even type anything. No, The mouse H Bloody Mouse doesn't work.

It's plugged in the USB it didn't detect it. bloody Linux type like the keyboard worked before. Why doesn't it work now? Unbelievable crap. Ah I Give up.

So anyway, there you have it. There's a look at an ICP Electronics Iei industrial computer with the uh, uh, well renowned Rocky motherboard. They're used absolutely everywhere. They're uh, phenomenal and this one looks, uh, to be, uh, fairly new, fairly modern, and in really good shape I like it, so don't know what I'm going to do with it I Don't really have a need for it, so probably go on eBay I Guess eh? unless you got better ideas.

Catch you next time.