Altair® AI Edge™ Device Hardware
Enclosure
Altair® AI Edge™ has an all-aluminum, anodized enclosure designed in-house by Altair Engineering at its global headquarters in Troy, Michigan. It is designed to resist dust and moisture, and allows installation via one of five standard 3/8-16 ("tripod thread") sockets to make it easy to install in a variety of applications.
Note: Although the enclosure is designed to resist dust and moisture, it is not a sealed device. Altair® AI Edge™ devices should be visually inspected periodically to ensure relative cleanliness and low moisture.
I/O and Power
The device only has one externally-exposed connector: a standard RJ45 Ethernet jack that requires both network connectivity and power via Power-over-Ethernet (PoE).
The device requires at least 15W of power from PoE - either via an injector or from a PoE-enabled switch.
Controls and Indicators
The device has no buttons or switches. Power and network connectivity are both indicated on the bottom of the device via standard yellow and green LEDs on the RJ45 Ethernet jack.
Air Cooling
The AI Edge device uses active cooling, supplied by a small DC fan, to keep the SBC and PoE HAT operating at normal temperatures. It is normal to hear the fan cycle between low and high speeds depending on the computational activity of the device, and the ambient temperature of the device installation.
Air is designed to flow IN via the five slots on each side of the device, and OUT via the twelve holes on the back of the device.
AIR INLETS | AIR OUTLETS |
---|---|
The four mounting standoffs on the back of the device are designed to ensure that air flows out from the back of the device even if the device is mounted flush to the back.
Note: There is a thin layer of air filtration media on the inside of both the air inlet slots and the air outlet holes. This filtration media is not customer-accessible. If you believe that the media has become unable to allow air to flow freely, please contact Altair Support.
Label and Serial Number
The serial number (S/N) is printed on the label on the back of the device. It is also the device's pre-assigned MAC address.
Dimensions
11.2 cm x 9.7 cm x 5.6 cm
Note: measurements shown are approximate. CAD files available upon request.
Boards
Single-Board Computer (SBP) and microSD Storage
The SBP is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, powered by a Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC with 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage via an on-board, industrial microSD card. Due to the way we partition it, the available space to the user is approx 50GB.
Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) HAT
Mounted on top of the SBP is a PoE "HAT" that allows the device to be powered by PoE rather than the default USB-C connector. Specifications and other information about the board can be found on the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT page.
Camera
The Altair® AI Edge™ device includes a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 mounted onto the inside of the aluminum enclosure. It has a Sony IMX708 12-megapixel camera sensor with HDR and phase detection autofocus. It connects to the SBC via a Raspberry Pi camera cable.
For specifications, please see the official Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 product brief.