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Ask Slashdot: How Do I Make a High-Spec PC Waterproof?
jimwormold writes: I need to build a system for outdoor use, capable of withstanding a high pressure water jet! "Embedded PC," I hear you cry. Well, ideally yes. However, the system does a fair bit of number crunching on a GPU (GTX970) and there don't appear to be any such embedded systems available. The perfect solution will be as small as possible (ideally about 1.5x the size of a motherboard, and the height will be limited to accommodate the graphics card). I'm U.K.- based, so the ambient temperature will range from -5C to 30C, so I presume some sort of active temperature control would be useful.
I found this helpful discussion, but it's 14 years old. Thus, I thought I'd post my question here. Do any of you enlightened Slashdotters have insights to this problem, or know of any products that will help me achieve my goals?
I found this helpful discussion, but it's 14 years old. Thus, I thought I'd post my question here. Do any of you enlightened Slashdotters have insights to this problem, or know of any products that will help me achieve my goals?
Make it water-cooled! Duh.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Some servers have been designed to have the motherboard immersed/sealed in dielectric fluid in a sealed box to take the heat out, which would also be in a sealed structure. That stops the need for air as a heat transfer method. Would require waterproof electrical connectors.
NEMA rates enclosures for their ability to withstand harsh environments. Search for NEMA enclosures and pick the one that fits your machine.
John
Can you give us curious folk a hint as to what you're doing?
Just put it in The Cloud. The Cloud is fun! The Cloud is fair!
They make "Ruggedized Computers" in Montgomery Alabama.
http://www.skbspecialtycases.com/
I deal with this kind of thing once in a while when deploying hardware in freezing conditions (down to about -60F), and the truth is there aren't many options that are as small as you want.
you have 3 types of cooling all 3 present different problems. -passive cooling. typical of embedded and low poer, pretty much precludes your fancy GPU. -active, usually fans. suck air in, breath hot out. obvious any rain or spray would get sucked in to, and damage the insides. -liquid cooling. would essentially seal your gear in, and prevent water damage, but is unlikely to fit in your space constraints. so either figure out how to live without the GPU, or see if you can get a small enough container for your oil ( still will have to worry about the pump and radiator parts but that can be made water - resistant). or have the number crunching done remotely, and just live with a raspberry pi encased in something.
Yes, you can find off the shelf computers which will do this and which have real GPUs.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ruggedized+pc
... email people who make industrial PC's for a living, contact them and have a chat.
http://www.advantech.com/
http://www.liquipel.com/
They coat the chips in some sort of coating that insulates them.
Another idea which I like even better is to immerse the whole machine in mineral oil.
It is non-conductive. Somethings might need to be insulated against the oil like harddrives but everything else can just sit in it. From what I've gathered the entire tank of mineral oil acts like a giant heat sink to such an extent that a system like that can passively cool itself WITH overclocking.
I keep meaning to build a mineral oil cooled computer and keep chickening out.
Anyway, it has the virtue of being something you could seal and then take to the literal bottom of the ocean without worrying about a rupture.
That is pretty water proof.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This is the big question. Because, to riff off the 14 years old discussion, wireless has progressed leaps and bounds since then. So simply putting the PC inside a waterproof chest and using a combination of WiFi, Bluetooth, and a few wireless display technologies. This is what is presently on Intel's product roadmap anyway.
Your biggest problem is likely to be the monitor. Every means we have to produce significant amount of light (especially required for outdoor viewing), requires dissipation of heat. That means venting. Which means air holes. Which can get spray in it.
So really the question can't be answered unless you explain the purpose of the PC. Is it there to do things like take measurements? Can it be controlled from a mobile phone? (they're much easier to seal) This is what is needed to know how to give further advice.
Submerge the whole thing in mineral oil in a sealed container. Then you can have a fish tank heater with a thermostat and an external heat exchanger. Should be pretty straight forward since there's tons of info about liquid cooled PCs.
Use a 50 cal ammo can. 100% water proof. Couple your CPU/GPU heatsink to the case and mount finned heat sinks on the outside.
Google 50 cal ammo can computer case. You will find a lot of howtos.
ingress protection (google that term) isnt hard. most likely you can drop a mini ITX computer case in a sealed case (otterbox?), pop on a cable gland for power (strip the cable down to individual wires going through the gland and watertight epoxy the gland). do it right and you could drop it 100m underwater. (check the openROV project)
here's the real problem: temperature. you need to sink the heat from the power, cpu, mobo AND avoid condensation. piping that out of the case. argh.
how about a raspberry pit or beagleboner reading your data & transmitting that to a real computer for crunching?
Have you thought about looking at some of the cases used for mineral oil cooled PCs? Since they are leakproof from the standpoint of being able to contain the oil within itself, that pretty much makes them waterproof from the outside automatically, right?
You're going to have a hard time finding a high spec computer that meets your needs, because of the cooling requirement. If I were you, I'd look to industrial enclosures designed for water proof operation. (there are industrial computer enclosures) Make the system water cooled so that you can run cooling lines outside the enclosure and use an external pump and radiator; this will allow you to minimize the size of the enclosure containing the computer. You'll have to accommodate the VRMs and Southbridge, which are typically passively air cooled (but do require cooling). You might try taping off connectors and spraying the PCB with conformal coating, to reduce the damage should water get into the enclosure. Connectors can be filled with dielectric grease on the pin entry side and epoxy on the wire side to prevent water access there.
I have never tried to do this with a computer; although, the techniques above have been used by me in other applications.
The Toughbook might be an option.
Why don't people provide more details when asking questions? Really, you'd think a bunch of IT related people would be sick of getting questions with vague details and thus be better at making their own questions.
Do you actually need a PC in that environment? Can you use a rugged wireless display/embedded system within reach of the jet, but connected wirelessly to the computer with the GPU that's in a safe location? This is probably the easiest and cheapest setup.
Unless that "high pressure water jet!" cuts through metal.
Metal box. Seal the seams. Add duct-work and fan if necessary for cooling. Run cable out conduits. Fill conduits with water sealing goop if needed.
What's so hard about this?
If the water jet is always present and not too warm, it could be used for cooling. Just put the computer in a waterproof aluminum box (maybe with fins?) and attach the hot parts of the computer to the box with heat pipes.
Encase the PC in a fireproof rubber balloon like the ones used in Formula One and fill it with perfluorocarbon (PFC), then encase that in a rust-proof metal box.
your car.
or perhaps more realistically, a small refrigerator.
I need to build a system for outdoor use, capable of withstanding a high pressure water jet! "Embedded PC," I hear you cry.
No, I cry - well, no, just say, really - "why?"
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Double enclosed is best, but you probably don't have room for that. I've been putting stuff in food processing plants for 20+ years though where the conditions (especially during cleanup) are comparable. Find the smallest Pelican case (there are generic knockoffs, if you go with one check it thoroughly before trusting it) and equip it with a thermostatic heater to keep the temperature above 70F or so all the time to limit condensation. Pack in a big bag of dessicant because without double enclosure that still won't be perfect.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Unless you have some real need for a monster CPU/GPU setup, which you did not explain, go low power. Intel Atom 'systems in a box can be passively cooled, and are extremely small. All of which make them ideal for water-proofing.
Are you planning on doing gaming, 3-d rendering or bitcoin mining? On a boat?
There are very few things that those little atom set-ups can't handle. I haven't found any. HD video is no problem for them. AMD also makes a slighter higher spec "neo". I don't have any experience with them.
Just wondering if you really need that much power, or are trying to tell yourself that you do. Smaller, low power machines (multiple?) would be much easier, cheaper, and require much less power. More power = more heat.
I have old Linksys wireless routers with DDWrt loaded out in the backyard. It's Oregon. It rains here... I used tupperware containers(or whatever fits from Home Depot), and a little hole for the power cord and some silicone calk in the hole. You can double enclose, and it'll run you maybe $10. :D
The computer would freeze to death. Normal components would contain electrolyte capacitors, which contains a liquid. This is a major reason why electronics often state that they do not work below 5 C. The liquid can freeze and as ice expands by around 10%, the casing will break. Once the ice melts, the corrosive liquid will be all over the place and the computer is dead. You would likely need to add heating to ensure case temperature do not drop below say 10 C even when the computer is off. You may want to rethink if you want to risk losing the computer just because the fuse broke during a winter night.
There are rules for how deep water pipes have to be to prevent freezing. That would work too for computers and would keep it safe from the water jet, though you would have a interesting engineering task regarding underground cooling.
Another thing, which comes to mind: wouldn't you have to make it theft-proof as well as waterproof? Copper wire vanishes at an alarming rate if left outside and I can't imagine they would be less interested in a working computer.
http://www.industrial-computer...
I'm used to IP67-IP68+(IE. IP69K) for my work in designing autonomous subs(although I have other experience from GPU mining bitcoins), but NEMA 4X is specifically designed for the high pressure water jet conditions you're describing.
Although I'm curious WTF you're doing in a mobile/stationary weatherized application that requires a GTX970(A Jetson TK1 is easier to cool and good enough for most computer vision problems)? I'll answer your question directly instead of asking you how I can back out of your difficult design requirements:
First off: Lets assume IP55 is good enough:
http://cosmotec.stulz.com/en/products/ventilation/kryos-filter-fans/
These are the most cost effective IP55 ventilation fans I've been able to find.
If that's good enough for you: get on McMaster and order a NEMA 4X enclosure and consider yourself lucky that was all you needed. You have an industrial cooling problem, they have industrial cooling solutions. If you want some a little closer to your side of the pond: request a catalog from Rittal or get on their website and see if they have anything that meets your needs.
If IP55 is not good enough, and nothing as generic as a cosmotec fan or a cooled Rittal enclosure can get the job done: you can start by reading all the other responses and see if anyone has a better suggestion I'm unfamiliar with. If not, your job is either impossible, no one here knows what the solution is(or isn't saying if they do), or you have to go custom. That means in house or out of house design.
First off lets make something clear: you have a thermal management problem, not a water ingress problem. It becomes a water ingress problem when you are unable to adequately manage your thermal output without circulating air from the outside of the enclosure.
Shedding the heat of a 500-1000W PC using nothing but convection cooling with the enclosure skin/fins is difficult in the size you've described so the easiest thing to do would be to cheat and exceed your volume constraints via an external radiator in a location where your volume constraints are less of a problem. Supposing that is not possible: in a stationary application the ground becomes a pretty good heat sink if you dig down far enough. An alluminum water block burried beneath your computer circulating water through a NEMA 4X enclosure on the surface with the CPU and GPU pimped out with watercooling blocks. Excluding that as a possibility(mobile application?): pumping the heat in to a thermally conductive chunk of material large enough to dissipate it is still your preferred solution.
If there is no way around self-contained: you're either going to have to spend a lot of time and energy maximizing the thermally conductive surface area(doing analysis to determine it is adequate to meet your use case a high enough percentage of the time to matter), make the system fail gracefully under the conditions where it exceeds it's thermal management capabilities, optimize system thermal efficiency to the greatest extent possible by doing things like underclocking the CPU and using more CUDA/OpenCL for your code, redesigning your system(using a wireless modem to offload the processing requirements to a datacenter like Amazon AWS or even a closet at a nearby facility), or some crazy combination of all of the above in appropriate proportions to maximize the value to the customer(whoever that is) on the time frame/capital investment scale they are willing to pay for, and/or manage their expectations appropriately to where you can redefine your requirements, and/or claim it's impossible and hope a smarter/more ambitious engineer doesn't prove you wrong.
The correct answer is so situation specific it is difficult to tell you what to do without more information. These are some of the questions I would ask. Good luck with your bizarre requirements definition. I'm sure you've been painted in to a corner for good reasons and not because of an unwillingness to compromise on the "I want everything" mentality that makes programs like the F35 and F22 so fucking expensive.
I played with the "waterproof pc" a lot and found the psu to be the bottleneck if the air inside the case reaches 50degC it will fail. I tried to use a cooling radiator inside the pc and a heatdump radiator outside. To get this working reliably, the fanspeed inside the case and noise is very high. A refrigiration unit or big radiator would do the trick but i'm not interested in such heavy enineering, over 50 kg for one 800watt pc is too much. Splashproof covers/shutters are most cost effective.
He's running a high end graphics card. During the summer months that gives him a heat dissipation problem; during the winter months it will keep the termperature above freezing and protect his capacitors :)
I design rugged mobile computers for one of the industry leaders and you will have a problem to crunch that much data in the enclosure itself. You will need an IP65 or IP66 rated enclosure since IP specifications are not progressive - an enclosure which is rated to IP67 may not survive the localized pressure caused by a pressure washer.
Your best bet would be to buy a system that is designed for what you are trying to do and contains the rugged connections, and then figure out a way of offloading the calculations to another machine nearby which can properly offload the heat.
Put it in a waterproof box. If the box is metal, bolting a heatsink to the box (fins to the inside), might help transfer heat from PC to box (and thence to outside).
* A rugged box shouldn't be hard to find - look at weatherized enclosures for radio equipment or, failing that, an AC mains box made for outdoors.
* A modern CPU and a high end GPU in an airtight box won't be easy to cool. Since your only means of heat dissipation is the surface of said enclosure, it'd better be all-metal.
* Your next challenge is to convey heat from the CPU + GPU to the box - sounds like a job for watercooling, with regular blocks for the CPU and GPU and a third, possibly custom block attached to the enclosure wall instead of the usual radiator (which requires moving air). Overclocking forums may offer some ideas; also the "silent PC" forums since some are into fan-less designs.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
The answer of course is to update to IOS 7.
Many years ago, friend of mine was in army. He was in secret devision and one day they give to him a order: "Change the HDD of this PC" and they give to him new HDD, hammer and chisel.
He has surprised, because when open PC cover see massive block of epoxy. People before just fill the PC box with epoxy and made it fully water, shock and dust proof. Simple and reliable !
You must keep in mind that may be will have a problem with cooling of some staff like video card. You can do it with water block, if is not possible to cooling.
www.kioskstyle.com
it's the future!
You will need an IP66 enclosure. If your water jets are not that powerful maybe an IP65 enclosure. Search for them, there are plenty (not cheap though). Assuming that power is not a limitation (not a green device by any means), you can use a peltier cell or some of them to actively cool your device. Attach then directly to the steel of the enclosure. Put a heat-sink in each side. On the inside you can put a smaller heat-sink with fan. On the outside, use a bit fan-less heat-sink. You will need a big power supply to power the peltiers. You will need IP66 connectors. There are plenty of connectors (Google, Digikey, mouser are your friends). There are offerings from almost any type of connector (USB, Ethernet, Power). There are also LEDs, switches and other gadgets you could use in your box. Using this will be an expensive solution but you will not have problems with water getting into your computer.
Can you place your system somewhere safe and have remote (wireless ) sensors and peripherals?
This sounds like you are either too lazy or not qualified for this job. My advice is to find someone who installs this kind of thing professionally. You aren't going to impress your boss or anyone else when this fucks up due to you half-assing it based off what someone from /. told you to do.
Non conductive oils that completely fill the case can keep water out. Make sure the case has fins for cooling on the outside. Divers watches have used this method to assure their electronics don't drown.
Immersion PC. You'll already be working with a sealed case.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
do it
buy a Noax or build something similar.
ok, i have experience with this. Cooling is your enemy. We where able to run an i3-4130 for a dvr in a pelican case. Ambient was 53C under full load. This was with no graphics card. The hard drives lasted on average 9 months, which for our use case was acceptable. This was without outside temps at -10 to -40C. Ymmv but any SEALED enclosure has huge heat issues. Everything will be at the same temperature.
The oil will keep any ingress of water from a mostly sealed case.
With a ~150watt GPU, plus the rest of the system, you are going to have quite a time with heat dissipation in any case that is sufficiently waterproof. Even fairly impressive looking passive heatsinks are surprisingly feeble compared to the usual 'few heatpipes, bunch of fins, actual airflow' designs that normal PC hardware uses. Even if you can add enough of them to your computer's case, you still need an excellent thermal path from the CPU and GPU to the case(for reference, Zalman released a somewhat ridiculous case for this purpose a number of years back. As you can see from the photos, the design requires a pretty substantial number of custom heatpipes for the CPU and GPU to be in meaningful thermal contact with the big passive cooler side panels, while a custom PSU had to be used to keep that part cool. It also cost $1,500)
You may also run into trouble, even if CPU and GPU are OK; with high internal air temperatures: most PC gear has a variety of other heat sources(basically anything with electricity involved, VRMs, motherboard chipsets, RAM, etc.) that are typically ignored for water cooling purposes; but which depend on a modest flow of reasonably cool air to stay within their limits. A fanless PC with decent convection might be OK; but a sealed box isn't going to cut it.
If you can get away with it, your best bet would likely be breaking the problem into two parts: the sealed computer case, with waterblocks on the CPU and GPU, and a radiator with fan for cooling the air sealed in the case and keeping it moving for the benefit of lesser components; and the radiator module, which pumps coolant back into the computer case and cools the heated coolant coming out.
This should allow you to fully seal the computer side of things(with the exception of the necessary data and power connections, for which IP-rated connections are available, and the input and output hose fitting) without it cooking and dying; and leaves only the radiator, pump, and possibly a fan outside the sealed case in the radiator module. Given the demands of vehicle engine cooling and the common need for fully submersible pumps, both are available in very waterproof versions, and the heat dissipation of the radiator should actually improve if it's being sprayed down.
If cold is a concern, you'll of course need to use antifreeze in the coolant, and a temperature sensor in the computer module that either activates an internal heater, reduces coolant flow rate, or both, to allow the computer module to remain at a safe temperature.
Sealed box with cooling fins. Fill with mineral oil.
If that is not enough to keep the parts cool then..
A pump in the box could circulate the minera oil.
A tube snaking through the box could have water flowing in it from the outside forming a heat exchanger.
Good Luck!
If you are a typical Slashdotter, a side benefit to you when working with a mineral oil cooled pc
- For once you can leave your basement with slick, oily hands and still look mom in the eye and feel inocent when you tell her you were just working on your computer
Seriously, get an ammo box. The big ones made for 20mm and 40mm vulcan, like this:
http://www.majorsurplus.com/20mm-Ammo-Cans-P14955.aspx
They're airtight, heavy duty, and cheap. Get a motherboard tray and drive cage to install. I chopped up a cheap mid tower for my insert.
Mine's air cooled and meant to be open while running, but you could install water cooling and mount the radiator to the outside, just drill holes and use airtight fittings. If you really wanted to be sure you could even weld pipe to it, it's made of thick steel.
My build:
http://deadface.org:8080/pics/ammo-box-pc/
Somebody mentioned a pelican case. That (or similar eg NEMA 4 or 4x) is a good start. But if you cannot get the heat out of the case it doesn't take much power to cook a PC even at -5C exterior temperature and at 30C it takes very little added power.
It sounds like you are talking hundreds of watts. So you need to make it entirely liquid cooled. This means everything that would normally have a fan -- processor, video card, chipset, and power supply. In addition you will likely need a fan in the enclosure to prevent hot spots, and if that isn't enough you'll need to liquid cool those hot spots.
At this point you should be thinking about submerging all the electronics in an oil tank and circulating the oil thru the radiator as your coolant. (Use light mineral oil, because it will get thick at -5C and you may have to heat it so it will flow thru the lines!) Mineral oil submersion will also protect the electronics against condensation.
The radiator will need to be outside the pelican case. It will most likely need a fan at 30C, so you should use an automotive or similar fan with a proper temperature rating range. Also mount the coolant reservoir externally so you can check the level and fill without opening the enclosure.
If not mineral oil, the cooling system will need to be filled with something to provide freeze protection below your lowest low temperature. (Antifreeze, various alcohols, sugar water, etc.)
The pump will likely need to be controlled to run very slowly when temperatures are cold. But -5C should be okay for everything except perhaps fans and mechanical hard disk (so use SSD). For a less power hungry PC or colder temperatures you might need to insulate the case. If the PC must start when cold -5C is probably okay but you may need to provide auxiliary heating to warm it up to maybe 10C before powering the PC (almost certainly required if using mineral oil or at temperatures colder than -40C, but perhaps at -10C or even at -5C depending on your equipment). You can heat the air in the enclosure but heating the liquid in the cooling system is more efficient if it will thermosiphon within the enclosure. You don't want to pump coolant thru the radiator while trying to heat it.
Mount the equipment without penetrating the case. Keep all electric stuff up as high as possible off the bottom of the case. Condensation or leaks will puddle at the bottom and you want to keep the gear out of that puddle.
Make the cooling, power and connectivity lines come out the bottom of the case (to prevent puddles from slowly seeping in) thru liquid-tite cable glands (to keep out bugs and lightly pressured water). A drop tube around the exit (or each exit) will help protect against high pressure water jets except for a direct stream into the end of the tube. You might also like a valve in the bottom of the case. You can open the valve and if liquid runs out you need to take down and service the system. Do not make any other case penetrations.
Trust me, cheap computer + Tupperware + vnc. Keep your expensive equipment indoors and access it remotely.
Add IPX8 to the high specs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
First, understand what is already sealed. Silicon chips are already hermetically sealed. No water can get in. Second, any 'open' circuit traces can be a source of shorting (water conducts electricity) so these need to be sprayed with a silicone spray. Next, any machine sockets need to be silicone sprayed too. Via holes running either on top (surface mount) or through must be sprayed so that there is no chance for water to short circuits. Any connectors need to be masked off. And that's the circuit boards. I know because I worked for a control systems company, and that's what we had to do for gas plant circuit boards (the solder we used was water soluable), and we would put populated boards (boards with chips soldered in) in a Sears Kenmore dishwasher (with the heat cycle off), and run them for about 20 minutes. They have to be dry before electricity is applied and we would make sure all water was gone, but use silicone spray to keep harsh chemicals from eating the boards.
http://defense.ge-ip.com/products/magic1/p2077
Simple:
1. Put your conventional, fan-cooled PC inside a completely sealed all-metal case. (With water-tight ports for CAT-5, USB, whatever.)
2. Line the inside of the case with Peltier junctions wired to power, through a thermostat.
3. On the outside of the case, aligned with each Peltier junction, you place a heat sink. Heat to be transferred through the metal case.
4. If the thermostat detects high temp inside the case, it energizes the Peltier junctions to be cold on the inside, hot on the case side.
5. If the thermostat detects low temps inside the case, it energizes the Peltier junctions to be hot on the inside, cold on the case side.
Others have posted most of what I'd suggest. If you want to consider running heat pipes to the case and have the case act as a giant heat sink, have a look at the 2008-2014 Mac Pro cases, which are solid aluminum. They'd probably be among the best options for a case that is also a heatsink. Finned heatsinks could be added to the outside of the case.
I'm not sure how you will accomplish what you are looking to accomplish in the space constraints you outlined but if you do I suspect it will be using 3M's Novec 7000. It aint cheap but you can fully enclose your box and it uses convection to circulate.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Or a recent iPad in a waterproof case?
They're waterproof enough for what you describe.
What's the application, anyways?
here's one i found only the video processor is not defined linux/win I7 processor http://www.drs-ts.com/pdf/JV5%...
192 cuda cores, doesn't use much power, so little heat to dissapate.
https://developer.nvidia.com/j...
Or, maybe re-write your application to use an fpga?
If you are using the gpu for display, then just do the compute elsewhere, and use a low power box, with a simple frame buffer, that you can seal up.
Try this search
href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pc+ip66 Dust Tight + Water Jet Tight
href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pc+ip67 Dust Tight + Submerge to 1m
href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pc+ip68 Dust Tight + Submerge beyond 1 m
ip rating definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code
environment resistant pc's are much more available now than the last time I looked. They are more expensive and tend to be lower performance than desktops. ip66 monitors which can be viewed in full sun are also readily available
It is unlikely that you have an application that requires building from scratch, but it is more fun.
First of all, take the computer out of the high pressure water jet. You should be able to use some relatively short cables, (2M to 4M) for any sensors or servos you might need. Second, convince your employer that you don't actually need to have the computer in the path of a high pressure water jet. Third give some more info about what you want to do or reasons why you want to have a computer in such a position. Finally, if its because its what your employer wants, see number 2. Sorry to be a blunt asshole, but it sounds like your specs are being provided by another blunt asshole that drives a desk.
Or are you just trying to be cool?
If you can live with an HD 4400 graphics enigne, you can get a Small PC iBrick, which is an Intel Mobile Core i3 processor in a sealed, watertight box with cooling fins.
There are industrial cases available for fast food restaurants. Those can handle routine pressure washing.
1. Rent a Sub/Drone
2. Place PC inside Sub/Drone
3. Clickty!
Nice suggestion - even if he needs more processing than that, it's easier to put 2-3 in and they'll run cooler too, which will help with his biggest challenge: heat dissipation.
I suspect that the problem here is that you're asking the wrong question. You are trying to solve a very hard problem - how do I run a high performance PC in a location where it will be blasted with water jets - but that's not actually what you want to do; you want to accomplish a task. You haven't posted the actual task, so all we know is that it takes place outside and there will be water jets. Even so, that's enough to make me sure that there will be a better way to solve this.
Without more data we can't give you a good solution, but even without more data I can tell you that trying to waterproof a high-performance PC (and, presumably, a generator to run it from) is not going to be the right idea.
The small town IT shop I used to work in made 5 computers for fishing boats. The requirements were they needed dual screens, and being in sea air they needed to be sealed units that are able to withstand the constant movement of a boat at sea - and to run their GPS mapping navigation software during the day, while playing movies on the lounge plasma at night.
We took a fanless NUC type device, i think it was an eeebox with a 1ghz atom pc, removed the motherboard from the case and put it into an aluminuim case which was basically a large heatsink on one side, with the motherboard and processor screwed to it so the heat could escape real easily. We did this because we knew the early prototype eee netbooks were going to be designed to use the keyboard backing plate as the heatsink and would run without a fan - they did put a fan in them on the released version, but it gave us confidence to just use a massive heatsink in place of a fan.
Then basically a small box would sit over the top enclosing the whole motherboard. a rubber seal went around the inside, and a 64gb SSD hard drive was screwed to the opposite side which was also a finned heatsink. The SSD board was removed from its case and pasted to the side so its heat could escape easily too.
After an hour of watching a movie with a hot-day room ambient temperature of 24 degrees C, the internal temperature of the device was something like 32 degrees. We were aiming for less than 50 degrees which was awesome.
The sides of the box were cut for usb plugs, and hdmi / dvi outputs with everything sealed to prevent salt air getting into the box.
I'm curious why you can't use one computer with smaller footprint (and specs) and send everything via wireless to a bigger computer which is not co-located (and therefore doesn't need the waterproofing)?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Can you bury the computer in a box, and have a "Chimney" for the air flow?
You will want the chimney to be a little complex due to the water cannon, but other than that, the buried box might mitigate a lot of problems, including space.
Though it can be expensive.
Water cooling in an air tight box is nice... but that depends on the pressure being imposed on the box.
What is more effective would be to immerse the entire box AND its contents in flourinert liquid, as well as the cooling apparatus to the outside.
The advantage is that the box containing the fluorinert will take pressures of almost anything without causing too much problems. The only issues are the chips that contain air/nitrogen - they may be compressible. Also any bubbles in the circuit boards and components involved, but this problem is not very likely to happen unless you are going to the bottom of the Marianas trench.
Disadvantages:
1. cost - fluorinert is not cheap, nor is handling it cheap. I believe that due to the fluorine in the flourinert causes it to be considered a hazardous material.
2. weight - the combination of fluorinert + box + cooling will make for a rather heavy box (about the same or more) as the volumn of water + box + cooling
3. servicing the computer can be time consuming. The problem here is the need to make sure there are no air bubbles in the box as that can be compressed, which imparts a compression to the unit.
Mitigating #3 is that air will dissolve into fluorinert allowing it to be removed by pumping the flourinert through a filter to help remove the air from the solution.
Advantages:
1. Heat is conducted away from the electronic parts extremely well.
2. It will tolerate very high pressures without problems
As many will point out, getting rid of heat is one of your larger concerns. When you say "'-5 Centigrade", do you mean it will be sitting turned off and then activated and then enabled at that temperature? If there's a chance of getting freezing and thawing ice into exposed components, there are a _lot_ of mechanical and electronic devices that do not behave well when abused this way. Simply repackaging an untested design may fail at startling moments.
It sounds like you should talk to your local meteorologists or marine biologists. I'd asume that your local Coast Guard or equivalent will have a great more hands-on experience than most Slashdot readers working from theory.
Shoot yourself in the head. Stupid moron
High end computer goes somewhere standard and safe, standard embedded pc gets deployed near the hazard area and relays data back?
I've got some old radio gear from the military, and when you're dealing with a 300w uhf transmitter that needs to go into an unpressurized area of an aircraft, you have to go down this same road, because it needs to be AIR-tight (to a large pressure differential), not just WATER-tight.
One unit I have here is a tube type amp. Tubes are NOT efficient. Their solution was to make a hermetically sealed case (complete with pressure gauge and what looks like a bicycle tube valve on the outside. A part of the inside is a heat exchanger, and a fan runs internally to circulate air around in the case. There's a 1x1 hole in the back for intake, and 1x1 hole on the bottom for exhaust. That, along with about 24 1/4" bolts and a large gasket, allows this amp to remain sealed, pressurized, and cooled at 30,000 ft. Note that while there was a fan on the inside exchanger, the unit itself had no external moving parts. The slot you dropped the radio into in the aircraft supplied the moving air into and out of those external holes for the external side of the exchanger.
The old motorola maxtraks were mostly solid-state, but used tubes for their internal PA amp. Instead of a heat exchanger, they used passive radiation for cooling. The power transistors that inverted the AC to run the tubes were bolted onto the sides, were completely covered, but were attached to a large chunk of slightly finned aluminum. It didn't radiate very efficiently, but they didn't generate a LOT of heat, and the plates had a relatively large surface area, so it was enough.
The tubes on the back were a very different story. Normally you cool tubes with air convection, or in much larger applications, with a built-in water jacket. These were placed sideways in the back, and a LARGE hunk of aluminum fitted over them. The inside of the aluminum was curved to wrap around the outer 1/2 of the tube, and be in contact with it. The outside of the aluminum had many large, durable fins. So these tubes were kept cool by passive radiation.
Those maxtraks were made to be tossed (literally) into the back of a squad car and go on high speed joyrides without damage. They were tanks, and used NO air circulation.
I doubt you can use an air exchanger like in my first example, but there it is for reference in case you can use it. You're more likely to go with the second example, and just use a sealed case with a large passive heatsink. You could also just go with the heat pipe and radiator you have for the CPU already, and move that part of it out from the middle a bit, and run the exchanger line(s) out of the main enclosure, exposing the radiator to the outside. That would be fairly easy to waterproof, but most of those exchangers are made of copper and may not fare well when exposed to water. You will also need some sort of a screen / filter to keep the fins clean. The maxtraks didn't care about that, their fins were large plated aluminum, and spaced far apart. Much more durable than a modern heat pump radiator.
You could take inspiration from any modern day solid state amplifier. Even the audio amps would be worth a look, though they don't actually deal with anywhere near as much heat dissipation. (efficiency can get pretty high at audio frequency, and VERY poor at high radio frequency, making good cooling necessary) Many designs use extruded aluminum with fins on the top and two sides. Salvage a chassis off a burned up audio or rf amplifier like this, and go from there. Waterproofing the enclosure will probably be your bigger challenge than cooling.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
answers to those q would help
Take a look at LiquidCool Solutions.
They are working to develope an oil cooled PC that meets your IP ratings.
I put together a system a few years ago for use doing offshore surveying in the surf zone. The system is carried on the back of a jet-ski type PWC, and has to withstand constant salt water spray and splash, as well as occasional immersion. It consists of a PC, a monitor, an ultrasonic depth gauge, a GPS receiver, and a custom keyboard, all mounted on the jet-ski.
The case is an off the shelf Pelican waterproof travel case, with all connections in and out of the box through Seacon waterproof bulkhead connectors and plugs. Because this thing is in a sealed black plastic box used outdoors in full sunlight, cooling was an issue. It was solved by using a seawater cooling loop supplied by a tap off of the propulsion jet on the jet-ski pump. The monitor is a 9" TFT mounted in a smaller pelican case with a viewing window up on the handlebars, with the UI handled via a custom 12-key "keyboard" constructed from industrial watertight switches in an IP68 enclosure.
System is still in regular use, with the only repairs being damaged cables when the driver flipped the jet-ski in harsh surf and ripped things physically apart.
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Are you trying to cheap this off or do it right?
If you're going cheap, put it in an ammo box. Force through it with a duct fan, I'd weld flanges onto the box (since I've got my MIG up and running now) to attach the up and down pipes. This solves your air circulation problems to the point that you might not even need fans in the box. Ammunition cases have rubber seals. You may have to inspect the boxes carefully to find one with a good seal. You'll still need a drain as well, and it should have a long hose attached to prevent spray, and a restrictor to prevent bugs.
If you can do anything you want, water cool it and make a water block to go on the outside of a truly well-sealed box. Monitor the temps in the box and run seti, folding@home etc for heat if necessary.
Or, how about a waterproof enclosure which can't handle direct spray inside of a bigger box with drains which will deflect it? That's how cars work. It's remarkably effective
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Buy an industrial aluminum external mount box with gasket sealed top and bottom you bolt on and seal.
It must also have sealed power and monitor data entry/exit and whatever on-off/reset switch is needed.
You need to transfer heat from the CPU to the walls. The standard CPU cooler is fine, it transfers the heat to the inside air - but you also need to couple the internal air heat to the wall. So you mount a few aluminum fanned heat sinks flat to the aluminum walls by screws to the brackets that the case will have because you chose such a case from a catalog. For a typical system that dissipates about 300 watts, and the heat sinks will need thermal grease to the walls.
A sealed oil filled case will also work, remove the fan and rely on bulk convection to the low viscosity oil that fills the case totally. This will also need power, data, reset in/out.
There might be cases that fit your needs off the catalog floor = $$$
Look for enclosures built to IP67 standard. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code
A very specialized case for only $325? Seems like an inexpensive way for the OP to get his project going.
It has a gasket around it. the holes you would use to install waterproof panel mount connectors or run conduit from the chassis to the building, if it is attached to a building.
by keeping it away from water
You say you are UK based and the ambient temperature is from - 5 to 30 degrees C. Which part of the UK enjoys 30 degrees C? Also are you eliminating Scotland from your travels where it can get lower than -20 degrees C?
Computer components can be submerged in mineral oil. This may aid in the waterproofing equation. If designed appropriately, the water introduced to the system could be taken off the top (as water and oil do not mix). Perhaps it could be sealed (with passive / active cooling provided by the oil's high heat capacity) and any introduced water would not need to be dealt with.
It sounds like you're using the GPU as a DSP. Why not just get an embedded processor with a built in DSP? An example of an older generation one is the Atmel at9g45m. This is an older ARM core processor which has more power than you would expect. You can probably get away with using a fanless ARM system for your application. You may even find one that has enough processing power which doesn't even need a heatsink.
Either conformally coat the entire system and/or stick it into a NEMA IP68 box with ducting for air intake that will never allow water to intrude, so ground facing intakes and outakes.
Put it inside a building and just run really long wires to what you need? Why does the whole system have to outside where high pressure water jets are an issue, is this going inside a carwash or something? A bit more context would be handy here.
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