And were always impressed by their quality, packaging, informational materials, and meticulously produced comprehensive manuals. So would we pass an opportunity to take an early look at their new Karbon 300 compact rugged PC? We wouldn't.

Generally, the first thing you notice with most things from Logic Supply is that they really like the color orange. When you google Logic PC, they introduce themselves as "The Original Orange PC."

A look at Logic Supply's website suggests the company is quite fond of the color. This doesn't mean all of their products are orange, but most of their industrial grade embedded PCs are, and that certainly makes for an interesting visual change from the black and gray that bedecks the vast majority of industrial computing gear.

The Logic Supply Karbon 300 webpage boldly proclaims the platform as "the next generation of rugged computing." But what is the Karbon 300? It's not large, measuring just 2.2 x 6.1 x 4.7 inches. A modern smartphone is taller than the Karbon 300.

So what is an IoT gateway, and how does it apply to a product like the Karbon 300? By most definitions, the Internet of Things is based on a quad-tier model with, from the bottom to the top:

• The wireless sensor network level with sensor "mote" edge devices that communicate via standard protocols.

• The embedded IoT gateway level that shares, filters, and transports data.

• The intelligent systems and networking level that manages and analyzes data and turns it into analytics action.

• The cloud where big data and IoT apps and services enable smart transportation, smart buildings, smart process automation, smart energy systems, and numerous other instant-feedback realtime services that were not possible before.

Given increasing reliance of "the cloud," the Karbon 300 can also be pre-configured to seamlessly communicate with Amazon Web Services. To do so, AWS IoT Greengrass with Machine Learning (ML) Inference is available as a pre-installed option.

By now most know that "Internet of Things" refers to an emerging future where Internet connectivity increasingly includes all sorts of sensor-equipped devices instead of just computers, but what is Industry 4.0, and what do devices like the Karbon 300 bring to the Industry 4.0 table?

In essence, using the Industry 4.0 nomenclature,

• Industry 1.0 was the emergence of mechanical production in the first place (water, steam, etc.),

• Industry 2.0 refers to the introduction of mass production (electricity, assembly lines),

• Industry 3.0 to emerging industrial automation (PCs, robots and such), and now

• Industry 4.0 where intelligent networked systems go beyond mere machine control via feedback systems, interdisciplinary cooperation, IoT technology, and advanced resource/demand management to morph into "intelligent" or at least "smart" factories.

The Karbon 300, like most compact industrial PCs, is a simple and straight-forward design, a precision-engineered piece of computing machinery of very high quality. The design is rational down to the smallest detail. Compact and integrated enough to make for a small and handy package, but still large enough to easily accommodate industry-standard PC ports and modules. Do note, though, that while the Karbon 300 doesn't have a fan or ventilation slots, it is not a sealed unit (and doesn't claim to be).

The picture below shows the system from the top, rear, and front:

Unlike most industrial and panel PCs where I/O is either in the back or facing down, the Karbon 300 has edge-mounted I/O on three sides — top, front and back. That's because the unit is designed to sit upright, with its two large finned heat sinks freely exposed to cooling air. Our review Karbon 300 provided the following external ports:

• 4 x USB 3.0
• 1 x 3.5mm audio speaker/microphone
• 1 x CAN Bus 2.0B
• 1 x 8-bit Isolated Digital I/O
• 2 x RS232/422/485 serial
• 4 x Antenna cutouts
• 1 x 3-pin Terminal Block connector (9 to 36 VDC)
• 2 x DisplayPort
• 3 x GbE LAN (two of them optionally with PoE)

Faster storage

However, even SSDs have their bottlenecks. In terms of performance, for some time now that bottleneck has been the SATA interface between the storage module and the computer. SATA's been around for a decade and a half and data transmission speed has pretty much maxed out.

The PCIe standard, on the other hand, can reach throughput speeds up to several times higher, depending on which PCIe standard is used and how many "lanes" are available. And PCIe doesn't even require major changes. The standard M.2 connector supports both SATA and PCIe, and PCIe storage modules are the same "gumstick" size as SATA storage modules.

In rugged mobile computers, PCIe's adoption has been slow, despite all of its advantages. It's much to Logic Supply's credit that they made the switch. The pay-off is very noticeably faster "disk" performance.

The housing consists of those two L-shaped aluminum heat sinks with their massive finning. Open a few Torx 10 screws, and one of the aluminum halves easily lifts off, opening access to the top of the motherboard.

There is, however, a caution. With no fan there is no active airflow, and so heat generated by components must be dissipated through the aluminum heatsinks.

That is best done by facilitating direct contact, and Logic Supply does that by liberally applying thermal pads that conduct heat from hot components to the heatsinks. Those thermal soft thermal pads can easily rip and tear. Our Karbon 300 package came with a couple of thermal pad kits, just in case.

Logic Supply says that every component has been thermally optimized to provide reliable wide operating temperature operation, and the chassis is thermally designed to perform in whatever situation it finds itself in, from deserts to glaciers. Below a couple of thermal imaging views of the KARBON 300 while running a benchmark suite, taken with our FLIR One Pro camera.

A standard PCIe connector stood empty. It can be used with the optional Movidius Myriad VPU2 vision processing unit, or whatever other PCIe-based expansion is needed. What would the vision processing unit be used for? That'd be for industrial machine vision projects, facial recognition, machine learning, and emerging AI projects.

Performance

Just to provide an idea of the relative performance of the Karbon 300, we ran our two standard benchmark suites, PassMark (both versions 6.1 and 9.0) and CrystalMark. For comparison, we're also listing the results of a Logic Supply mini-ITX systems we've tested, as well as a couple of competitor systems similar to the Karbon 300.

Mini-PC/IoT Gateway Systems Benchmarks and Comparisons

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON	Logic Supply	Logic Supply	Advantech	Winmate
Model	Karbon 300	ML210G	ARK-1122	EACIL67
Model (click pic for review)
Year tested	2019	2014	2015	2019
Intel processor	Atom E3950	Celeron J1900	Celeron J1900	Celeron N3350
Cores/threads	4/4	4/4	4/4	2/2
CPU base speed	1.60GHz	2.00GHz	2.00GHz	1.10GHz
CPU turbo speed	2.00GHz	2.41GHz	2.41GHz	2.40GHz
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	12.0 watts	10.0 watts	10.0 watts	6.0 watts
PassMark 6.1	1,347.9	1,316.0	787.2	NA
PassMark 9.0	1,030.6	NA	NA	901.1
Overall CrystalMark	143,195	139,652	91,261	103,533

The results show three things:

• First, the quad-core Atom X7-E3950 Logic Supply picked for their Karbon 300 industrial Mini PC packs a decent punch. Although based on a heavily revised Atom processor architecture, Intel's "second tier" of processors that are less complex and require less power than Core CPUs often provide near Core processor performance, but in much more economical packages.

• Second, these Bay Trail and now Apollo Lake-based system perform at a much higher level than anything based on earlier Intel Atom processors.

• And third, the type of solid state storage chose for a particular system can make a big performance difference. That was the case with the Logic Supply ML210G we tested a few years ago, and now even more so with the PCIe NVMe-equipped Karbon 300.

The Karbon 300 by Logic Supply

The sticker said that they sent it it to us as innovators (well, we really only analyze and report), and that Logic Supply wanted to learn how the Karbon 300 could be used to transcend expectations and challenge what's possible.

First, that's the spirit, Logic Supply!

Second, the way we see it, this tough little PC is truly a sampler of what all is possible, a smorgasbord of standards, connectivity, functionality and options. Just the tool one needs to push the frontier. Be it within IoT, be it in Industry 4.0 and machine vision, be it in a thousand other emerging applications. -- Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, May 2019

Logic Supply Karbon 300 Specs: