Optimizing Intel x86 Fanless Embedded Computer platform for Smart Warehousing
2020-10-13

Background


With the development of industry demand and the increase of labor costs, intelligent storage equipment has become a major development trend, which has solved the market demand for unmanned storage management. Intelligent warehousing provides customers with an overall solution that greatly simplifies the process, realizes zero inventory, zero process, zero investment, zero time difference, reduces complicated manpower and logistics investment and expenses, improves work efficiency, reduces errors, and greatly Facilitate the current needs of customers in various industries. Warehouse control and management to coordinate the operation of various logistics equipment such as conveyors, stackers, shuttles and robots, automatic guided vehicles and other logistics equipment, optimize the decomposition of tasks, and realize the integration and unified scheduling of various equipment systems and monitoring is also vital.

Realizing intelligent warehousing helps: 

  1. Automatic management

  2. Real-time monitoring

  3. Automatically assign production tasks

  4. Multi-threaded processing, efficient operation




Relevant technologies

Bring powerful computing technology to new places with revolutionary Intel® CPU products. With the right performance, cost, and power efficiency at every node, you can scale edge computing technology across your data. Intel products and technology including the Intel CPU, TSN accelerate the capabilities of IoT systems and deep learning inference where you need it - from the edge to the cloud. This gives you insights at the right place and time, so you can make decisions faster and implement new operational strategies to drive immediate results

The Intel® Sky Lake& Kaby Lake delivers high processing performance at low TDP for this highly integrated Fanless Embedded computer with high reliability, ultra compact size design, remote management and end-to-end security.

The Intel® Ethernet Controller provides an ideal GbE solution for customers looking for a full-featured Gigabit Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical-Layer (PHY) solution. With support for advanced features such as 802.1AS Precision Time Stamping, ECC Packet Buffers and Integrated Non-Volatile Memory, the Intel® Ethernet Controller provides an ideal GbE solution for Desktop, Consumer Electronics, and other small form-factor Embedded Applications.

The Intel® Ethernet Controller uses a PCIe v2.1 one lane (x1) interface operating at 2.5GT/s. The Intel® Ethernet Controller contains two transmit and two receive queues for the single port. These queues offer Error Correcting Memory (ECC) protection for improved data reliability. The controller efficiently manages packets with minimum latency by combining parallel and pipelined logic architectures optimized for these independent transmit and receive queues. These queues, combined with Receive Interrupt Extension (MSI-X) support, provide a toolset for optimizing the performance on multi-core processor designs. Advanced interrupt-handling features to manage multiple interrupts simultaneously, combined with intelligent filtering, ordering, and directing of packets to specific queues and cores, enables load-balancing the network traffic flows to improve throughput in multi-core platforms. Other performance-enhancing features include IPv4 and IPv6 checksum offload, TCP/UDP checksum offload, extended Tx descriptors for more offload capabilities, up to 256 KB TCP segmentation (TSO v2), header splitting, 40 KB packet buffer size, and 9.5 KB jumbo Frame support.


Solution

Aiming at smart warehousing, with customers demanding of cost-effective, high-performance, and stable products, and support interaction, communication and other functional requirements, Future Robot Technology originally developed the E511 series fanless embedded industrial computer based on the Intel x86 platform Core 6/7/8th Gen i5/i3 Quad core processor, supporting dual display DP and VGA, with mSATA, Mini-PCIe and SIM slot for WIFI, BT and 3G/4G connections, with multi interfaces such as 4 USB 3.0, 4 USB 2.0, 3 GbE LAN and 6 serial ports etc., as to ideally support Smart warehousing application.

ü  Ultra-Compact size, easy to install into flexible positions in tight spaces

ü  Intel® Core 6/7/8th Gen i5/i3 CPU supports high performance

ü  Good compatibility, low error rate, support external network equipment

ü  Easy maintenance, high reliability, data & information sharing

ü  Intel Ethernet Controller i211 supports strongly for 2 GigE Vision cameras




E511 Fanless Embedded Computer
Figure 1.
 E511 series Fanless Embedded Computer. (Source: Future Robot Technology Co., Limited)



Future Robot E511 series Fanless Embedded Computer is a well designed highly integrated modular fanless embedded computer based on Intel technologies supporting industrial automation, edge computing applications, have been deployed and tested in the field, and provide bundled hardware, software, and support. The technology is scalable and designed to grow with customer requirements-enabling accelerated development and time to market.




Future Robot Technology Co., Limited (Future Robot in short) is a high-tech innovation enterprise focusing on Intelligent Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence. Future Robot, with strong R&D capability and market demand-orientation, design and provide worldwide enterprises and individual users with embedded products which are for Industrial Automation, Robot, Machine Vision, Medical Application, Intelligent Transportation, Education and Internet of Things applications.

 

Expert team with rich experiences in Machine Vision, Motion Control and Edge Computing:

Hardware engineering team

- x86, FPGA, DSP, Layout and testing Engineers

Software engineering team

- BIOS engineers, FPGA, DSP, Algorithm software engineers and system development engineers.

Industrial and structure design engineering team

- structure design, multi board and model design




As a member of Intel IoT Solutions Alliance and partner of Intel IoT RFP Ready Kits, Future Robot Technology Co., Limited aim to provide reliable, high efficient and cost-effective standard and customized solutions for the customers worldwide.