Expert Insights: Karbon 800 Series
Erick Kopff, Mechanical Engineer at OnLogic

Expert Insights: Karbon 800 Series

There's a lot to say about the Karbon 800 Series. It's a rugged fanless computer, for starters. You can find all of the details about what this series is capable of on our website. But we wanted to get some insights from the team responsible for building it. So we sat down with Erick Kopff , a mechanical engineer at OnLogic who was heavily involved with the development of the Karbon 800 Series, and asked him a few questions. Not surprisingly, he had a lot of fun details to share.

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The Karbon 800 Series by OnLogic

Holly Clayman : Firstly, can you explain what your role was in the development of the Karbon 800 Series??

Erick Kopff : Sure! I was the lead mechanical design engineer. As a key stakeholder of the project, I led the mechanical design, as well as, coordination with different departments and vendors to get all necessary sign-offs, and approvals; from the inception, all the way through the launch.?

Holly Clayman : How would you describe the Karbon 800 Series to someone?

Erick Kopff : I’d say It’s a rugged Intel? Alder Lake 12th Gen platform that expands to meet the needs of our customers. Let’s say?you need a very simple system with no frills and just some basic I/O, there's a Karbon 800 Series computer for that. Of course, if you are looking for extra storage or extra GPU capabilities, we have a K800 to meet those needs as well.?

Holly Clayman : What is one feature you are especially proud of?

Erick Kopff : Our attention to detail for different customer use cases is something that's really cool about the Karbon 800 Series. Throughout the development of the product, one main goal was to provide a large suite of products that could meet specific industry needs without forcing customers to overpay for features they wouldn't use. So, if you look at the Karbon 700 Series that came before, we offered a system with a medium amount of expandability (the K700-SE) and a system with a large amount of expandability (the K700-X2). Moving to the Karbon 800 Series, we have developed four systems that fill more gaps compared to the two options that the Karbon 700 Series provided. This gives the customer a greater set of options to choose from when selecting their specific solution.?

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Erick working on a Karbon 801

Holly Clayman : Can you expand upon that further? Pun intended.?

Erick Kopff : The thing that excites me a lot about the Karbon 800 Series is the expansion offerings in systems like the K802, and the K803. Looking at the K803, it's a really interesting offering because you get some of the GPU expansion that you might get in the K804. However, if you're willing to go with a slightly smaller GPU, you're able to save a lot on size as well and fit the system into environments that you might not otherwise be able to.?

Additionally, for K802, we have this standard form factor of expansion called ModBay which OnLogic has been using for a few product generations. By having a proprietary expansion bay like this, our team is able to design some really cool, highly optimized options that wouldn't normally be able to fit in these form factors. Having this menu of options to choose from makes it easy to discuss the capabilities of the system with our customers and give them the exact solution they need. It's straightforward for the customer, straightforward for our manufacturing team, and it's straightforward for our engineering team. I think that's really unique in our industry.?

Holly Clayman : What’s one challenge that you had to overcome throughout the process??

Erick Kopff : So, one challenge that we faced was taking our previous ethos for designing computers and moving that into the most recent Intel generation of CPUs, 12th Gen Alder Lake. There were a lot of changes that were made to the way that the CPU actually performs that had some big impacts on how we keep the processor cool with a passively cooled (fanless) system. And so, just taking all of the leaps and bounds Intel was making in their processors and making sure we're doing our due diligence to make sure that the new computer operates to the customers' expectations - and in some cases even exceeds them - was something we had to take a lot of time on.?

Holly Clayman : How did you and the team handle that challenge?

Erick Kopff : We have a really good relationship with Intel. And so, from the onset of the design, our entire engineering team was shoulder deep in all of the literature and all of the design guides that Intel releases with any new platform generation. From the very beginning of the design, we were already asking the right questions and making sure that we were paying attention to how this new 12th gen processor might perform - and what impact that could have on the system overall.

Holly Clayman : Can you share a bit more about the cooling of a fanless rugged system??

Erick Kopff : When you're designing a rugged computer, you have a lot of things to consider. You have one heat sink for the entirety of what's inside your computer and many things that you don't have to worry about when you have fans, become big issues once you're in the passively cooled space. You're not just taking into consideration how you're cooling the CPU, but also how you're cooling everything else in the computer, and that can get complicated.?

For example, if my heatsink is shared between the CPU and expansion, is that reducing some of the cooling capabilities of some of our expansion? You have to pay special attention to avoid unforeseen circumstances to make sure solving one challenge doesn't present others. At the end of day, I think the Karbon 800 Series performs incredibly well and when you're working with it, you can really tell how it's taking advantage of that overall attention to detail.

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The rugged Karbon 803 offers 12th Gen Intel Core power and PCIe Gen 4 x16 expansion.

Holly Clayman : Speaking of cooling, what’s the coolest customer application of the Karbon 800 Series?

Erick Kopff : I'm frequently on customer calls, both helping our customers understand what our computers can do and getting an understanding of what they want to do with our computers. One of the more interesting applications I’ve seen with our rugged line of computers is customers installing them in extremely remote locations while leveraging our wireless capabilities for data acquisition and storage.?

What's nice about having the Karbon 800 Series as a product offering to discuss with customers is that we really get to offer a product that seems almost tailor-made to their needs due to the scalability and expansion options of the platform. Because we've done the work up front to think about these things, it allows us to be flexible in these customer conversations in a way that I think is really fun as an engineer.

Holly Clayman : You may have seen this question coming because it’s a hot topic at the moment. But where does the Karbon 800 Series fit into the discussion around AI??

Erick Kopff : As far as Karbon 800 and AI,?one thing Karbon 800 has that sets it apart from the rest of our lineup on the rugged side, is its level of motherboard expansion. Having 1 mPCIe and 3 M.2 2280 slots gives us the ability to support customer expansion into that AI space through the use of things like VPUs and other accelerator cards. Our PCIe expansion also makes it easier to implement things like Nvidia GPUs for heavier compute loads!

Holly Clayman : Got it. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share??

Erick Kopff : Yeah, I mean, I could talk for hours about the Karbon 800 Series. We really thought about the system as a whole and the applications it would be powering. From the onset of our design we wanted to make sure that it would be highly reliable in the harshest environments our customers can throw at it, and I think we've done that. ?With any development like this - it takes a village and I’m really proud of the work the entire team did to get this amazing product to our customers.

Carla Wuthrich

Professional Manufacturing and Business Growth Advisor, Director of Field Operations

1 年

I'm curious!

Jen O'Neill

PRC Certified Full Cycle Recruiter | Dot Connector | Growth Mindset Believer

1 年

Love this Erick Kopff and Holly Clayman! So cool to get a glimpse into the process the Engineering Team's work.

Holly Clayman

Freelancer | Marketing | B2B Communications | Creative Concepts | Social Media | Community | Events

1 年

Thanks again Erick Kopff for sharing so many cool insights into this project. It was fun to get a glimpse into the work you and the engineering team are doing!

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