DFI AL551-TN-E3950 Intel Atom x7-E3950 3.5″ Embedded Board with Dual GbE and Extended Temperature

Passenger information screens, outdoor ticket machines and trackside terminals share one problem: the board has to start at -40 °C and keep running when the sun heats the enclosure. The AL551-TN-E3950 is the extended temperature build in the DFI AL551 series of 3.5″ embedded boards, rated for -40 to 85 °C with the full triple-display I/O of the series.

Its Intel Atom x7-E3950 (Apollo Lake) runs four cores at 1.6 GHz, bursting to 2.0 GHz, within a 12 W TDP. One DDR3L 1866 MHz SO-DIMM slot takes up to 8 GB, and a wide temperature SO-DIMM is worth specifying to match the board rating. Intel HD Graphics drives dual-channel 48-bit LVDS at up to 1920 x 1200, DP++ at up to 4096 x 2160 at 60 Hz and VGA at up to 2048 x 1536, all three at once.

Two GbE ports on Intel I210AT controllers carry content and management traffic. Two RS-232/422/485 COM ports and an 8-bit DIO connect ticket printers, validators and door sensors. USB is two USB 3.1 Gen 1 and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 on headers. An M.2 B-key (2242) with PCIe, USB 2.0 and SATA takes an SSD, and a full-size Mini PCIe socket takes Wi-Fi.

The AL551-TN-E3950 runs from 12 V DC on a 4-pin or barrel connector, cooled by a fanless heatsink, with firmware TPM 2.0, a watchdog timer and CE, FCC, UKCA and RoHS compliance. Where -20 to 70 °C is enough, AL551-EN-E3950 is the wide temperature version, and AL551-BN-E3950 is the 0 to 60 °C version for indoor panels.