Diamond Point D2511 ETX Baseboard

Introduction

The D2511 is a specially designed ETX carrier board for one of our customers. The customer had a requirement for a system which could monitor some inputs and indicate to a central PC (via TCP) of certain conditions. Prototyping was done using off the shelf PC/104 modules (Kontron MOPSlcdLX CPU module and Tri-M R-104 I/O module). Due to the amount of wiring required for this particular configuration, an ETX solution was chosen for production units.

The advantage of the ETX route is simple:

• In most cases, it means that no wiring is required - just plug the ETX module to the carrier board along with cooling module and thats it. Wiring is an extremely time consuming process. Wiring also contributes EMC issues.
• ETX allows easier heat removal via the uniform ETX heatspreader.
• ETX allows customer specific I/O
• ETX allows customer specific connectors to be used

An ETX solution was ideal for this customer. Diamond Point designed the baseboard to meet the requirements of the customer. The Kontron ETX-LX processor was chosen, as from a software point of view, it is almost identical to the MOPSlcdLX. The R104 relay module has screw terminal connectors, which were ideal for use during development. For production, Tri-M provided the R104 with vertical headers on the underside of the PCB. The ETX carrier board had mating headers which then routed the I/O to an external connector - so again, no cabling was required.

The ETX baseboard was designed to fit in an off the shelf aluminium box to save cost. The baseboard was designed so that the heatspreader made direct contact with the box to ensure that the heat generated by the processor module was dissipated to the box.