IOT-500 Review
7Pages

Technical White Paper The Review of loT-500, a Handy, Flexible Little Panel PC for Visualizing, and Responding to, What the Internet of Things is Doing

ARBOR Technology modestly calls their new IoT-500 a "5-inch RISC-based Panel PC." They also call it an HMI panel, where HMI stands for Human Machine Interface. It's both of these, but it's really a whole lot more. ARBOR goes on to say that the IoT-500 provides great flexibility and compatibility "no matter what system you need to control or monitor." And that gets to what the IoT-500 is all about. It's a neat way for people to interact with the emerging Internet of Things. The Internet of Things, or IoT, of course, is the hugely promising...

So what does such a miraculous box look like, and what's in it? It's small, just 5.9 x 4.3 inches, and only weighs 13 ounces or so. It technically is a little panel PC, but one that runs Android 5.1 and has a very nice 5-inch screen with capacitive multi-touch. And just like in any modern smartphone, flush glass extends well beyond the perimeter of the LCD screen, so that your fingers can easily operate it without bopping into a frame. Turn the little device around, though, and it shows its industrial side. There are full-size PC ports and industrial block connectors. The picture below...

The connectors along the bottom are familiar: a couple of USB 2.0 ports, an RJ45 LAN jack for Ethernet, a legacy DB9 serial port that's software switchable to RS232, RS422 and RS485. The green industrial-looking terminals on the right side are for power (the IoT-500 doesn't have a battery), and for digital I/O and a CAN Bus and OBD-II interface. Digital I/O lines can be used to interact with all sorts of equipment and sensors. CAN Bus is an electronic bus standard for vehicles, and OBD-II is a standard interface for onboard diagnostics. A...

Where can it be used? Almost anywhere. The polymer plastic housing is quite tough. It has a VESA 50 x 50 mm screwhole pattern on its back, which means that there's a limitless number of mounting solutions available for it. Since it's designed like a little panel computer it can also easily be integrated into a dash or panel anywhere. An application example is shown in the sidebar. In a Southeast Asia metropolitan area, an ARBOR GPS-based in-vehicle solution with ARBOR IoT-500 units lets dispatchers assign taxi requests from call centers faster and more accurately, allocating them to the...

Specifications ARBOR IoT-500 Status Card slots Display type Display size/resolution 5-point projected capacitive touch Operating temperature Polycarbonate, wall mount and 50 x 50mm VESA mount Size (WxHxD) 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x RJ45 10/100, 1 x RS232/422/485, 4 x DIO, 1 x CAN 2.0b/OBD-II, Bluetooth and 3G antenna, 0.8 watt speaker 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi plus Bluetooth 4.1 + HS, GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3G WCDMA/HSPA, GPS/GLONASS/Beidou List price ARBOR IoT-500 product page Data sheet Contact ARBOR IoT-500 spec sheet ARBOR Technology Corp. 10F., No.700,...

(by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer from RuggedPCReview) About ARBOR ARBOR Technology Corp., founded in 1993, is a leading provider of Smart City and IoT solutions. With more than 20 years of experience in providing customer-driven, high performance, and industrial strength computing solutions in various industries. ARBOR strives to provide a complete solution from board to system, computing to communication in healthcare, transportation, industrial automation, mobile computing, digital signage, retail, intelligent building and home. ARBOR is...