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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

One of our clients is an electric motor shop. They're a pretty great little shop, they do work for elevator companies and PG&E and the like.

Anyway, they have a dust problem -- a carbon / metallic dust compound that permeates and settles on everything in the shop. It's pretty ugly.

There are pretty much two strategies for that kind of an environment, computer-wise: construct a cheap acrylic enclosure with a HEPA filter and maybe a fan or two; or, buy a cheap computer and expect to replace it every 1 to 2 years.

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How about a completely fanless computer? Or does the metallic dust also cause shorts etc.?

Either way it also sounds like an unhealthy environment for humans to work in.

Fanless would have been better, but the case will still have some kind of vents for air cooling, and the dust tends to have a static charge -- so eventually it'll still kill the system.

It's not a great environment for people, no. I'd be wearing a dust mask for sure if I worked there. But, a lot of shop guys aren't like that, especially the older ones. They just do their job and don't mind the dust.

With a sufficiently low-power system, purely conductive/convective cooling should be sufficient. You'd be looking at a finned enclosure, possibly with a directed airflow over that.

The real problem is providing for ports (power, networking, comms) without penetrating the enclosure. The recent Marianas Trench submersible showed a number of connectors designed for very high pressure environments, something along those lines should be sufficient.

Grounding would deal with static.

FitPC is what you want—sealed, passively cooled enclosure. We use their second-generation Atom machine for robots and it works great. http://www.fit-pc.com/

my company makes computers without vents and with ESD protection.

the metallic dust does cause short circuits.

the office our pc was in was in an office built above the work floor and had very good ventelation but fine dust still made it up and on to every surface. once enough dust settled inside the pc it died.

it cannot be good for the humans there but still not the unhealtiest place i saw. that was a cabbies cubby were 20-30 taxi drivers sat waiting for jobs to come in and they seemed to all be chain smokers. the office was a converted shipping container with benches inside. a pc used for booking calls was brought in dead. when i opened it up there was a tarry goo on the motherboard and the fan was seized solid. after replacing the fan and sponging up as much of the goo as i could i went to clean the case. my boss asked if it was necessary so i took a sheet of a4 paper placed it on the metal case cover and smoothed it down. then i grabbed 2 corners of the paper and lifted the metal lid clear of the desk. the stickiness was pure tar. goodness knows how long the new fan lasted.

and as for what it did to the humans...

Oil cool the computers. I don't have the link but a google search will show you a lot of interesting builds. You don't have to worry about dust or filters because te entire pc is submerged in oil.

Well then you get other problems such as dirty oil (unless you have a good seal). The biggest problem I see is that it lasts as long as the shortest lifespan of all the components then you get to go through buying a new one or the mess of replacing that part.

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