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by TFortunato 3169 days ago
Hah, nice! Somewhat related, I once worked on a project that used a high reliability PC meant for extended use in "extreme" outdoor environments. One of the issues they (manufacturer) worried about was the pcb and solder joints experiencing thermal fatigue fron lots of seasonal and night/day temperature cycles.

Their ingenious solution was to always run the system towards the warmer end of its spec, and so it included a program that would monitor the temperature inside the case, and would spawn/kill a bunch of threads doing compute intensive math in order to keep the temperature constant when the users workload wasn't enough!
3 comments
andrewedstrom 3169 days ago
If only mining cryptocurrency had been a thing back then...
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TheSpiceIsLife 3169 days ago
That's amusing.

The laser cutter I operate simply has reverse cycle air conditioner mounted in one of the cabinet doors.

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Asooka 3169 days ago
Couldn't they slow down the cooling fans? Or was it a passively cooled PC?
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TFortunato 3168 days ago
Passively cooled. The thing was originally meant for extended use in "extreme" industrial environments (eg at a power substation, inside a wind turbine, etc..), so it had no vents or moving parts at all. Everything was heatpiped to the metal case, which looked like a heatsink.

Similar looking model from same company: https://selinc.com/products/3355/

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