ARES-1230 Series whitepaper
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Technical White Paper Sometimes You Need a lot (or a whole lot) of I/O in a Fanless Embedded Controller PC, Sometimes You Don't. It's Good to Have

Few know what fanless embedded controllers are, though we're using them in one way or another every day of our lives. They are small, minimal computers designed to do work behind the scenes, handling handling a vast range of tasks. They are called box or industrial PCs, though they are far from being "personal" in any shape of form, the "PC" simply referring to their use of industry standard processors, ports and components. They use most of the world's microprocessors to control things and make them work, all behind the scenes. Almost no...

ARES-1231: When yet more I/O is needed There may be situations where the two additional USB 2.0 ports, two additional RS232 serial ports, and four DI/DO ports of the ARES 1230-E still aren't enough. Then it may be time to roll out the big guns, in this case the ARES-1231. What the ARES-1231 brings to the table is a full 16 COM ports, and a full set of 16 DI and 16 DO ports. Of the COM ports, they all use standard DB9 connectors, but they come in three different configurations. Eight can be set to be either RS-232 or RS-485, four are DIM switch selectable for RS-232/422/485, and four are...

Clock Speed The table above shows what's the same and what is different between the three members of the ARES-123x Series. Design and construction In terms of construction, the ARES-1230 Series consists of beautifully milled aluminum top and bottom, spaced apart by aluminum corner pieces or sides. Finned aluminum heat dissipators are added on the two small sides of the rectangular body which acts as the primary heat sink, eliminating the need of a fan. Our sample 1230 model came in colorful anodized red and orange, the enhanced 1230-E model in mor

Below is a look inside each of the controllers, the 1230 on top and the 1230-E on the bottom. Opening the units is very simple. Undo four small screws and lift off the top. The ARES-1230 Series has a 150 x 115 mm rectangular motherboard that looks much like one of the many miniaturized ATX and ITX standard boards with edge-mounted I/O facing front and back. There's a single RAM slot, three PCI-e connectors (one mini, one half mini, and one long enough for up to 115mm modules). The basic ARES-1230 comes with that motherboard that includes...

That's where the genius of this design comes into play. The ARES-1230 board is designed to accommodate extra board layers for additional functionality via stacked modules and daughterboards. The addition of such boards makes the ARES-1230-E. Specifically, there's a large module that uses the long mini PCI-e connector on the motherboard to add two COM ports, digital I/O, a SIM card slot, and its own mini PCI-e connector. This module then daisy-chains to a second board that adds to additional USB ports and also replaces the base ARES 1230's...

Overall CrystalMark We didn't include any comparison units, but we still found some facts worth mentioning: • First, the performance level achievable with this relatively simple Bay Trail processor is at the level of much higher-end first generation Core processors of just a few years ago. That's remarkable. Second, our test units ran the 32-bit version of Windows 7. For some reason, the CPU benchmark numbers Passmark reported for the 1230 and 1230-E were about 25% lower than we saw with the same N2930 processor in the ARES-1231 (and also in the ARBOR Gladius G0975) with the same chip, but...

All this combines to make the ARBOR ARES-123x Series an exceptionally flexible and highly configurable fanless embedded controller platform that minimizes turnkey solution development cost, time, and effort. Specifications ARBOR ARES-1230/1230-E/1231 Status Fanless embedded controller Windows 7 32/64-bit, Windows 8.1 32/64-bit (standard or embedded), Windows 10 Intel Celeron "Bay Trail" N2930 Card slots 1 x mSATA, 1 x full-Size mPCIE (PCIex1 + USB2.0), 1 x half-size mPCIE (PCIex1 lane only) Optional external USB keyboard Operating...

1231: adds 4 x USB 2.0, 16 x DI, 16 x DO, 16 x COM Wireless List price Data sheet Contact ARBOR ARES-1230 Series product page ARBOR ARES-1231 product page ARBOR ARES-1230/1230-E spec sheet ARBOR ARES-1231 spec sheet ARBOR Technology Corp. 10F., No.700, Zhongzheng Rd. Zhonghe Dist., New Taipei City 235, Taiwan, R.O.C. Tel: 886 2 8226 9396 Fax: 886 2 8226 9398 Web: www.arbor-technology.com (by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer from RuggedPCReview) About ARBOR ARBOR Technology Corp., founded in 1993, is a leading provider of Smart City and IoT...