On 10/09/2012 10:05 AM, andy pugh wrote: > There is: http://www.roboard.com/ncbox-189.html It took a bit of work > to get a kernel that worked well, but that is done now. > http://www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/component/kunena/?func=view&catid=18&id=20692&limit=6 >
I followed that NCbox-189 thread on the LinuxCNC forum several months ago. Pretty nifty. Needing to maintain ongoing support for the Vortex86 seemed a bit more complicated than needed and the difficulties with the ethernet hardware that managed to be one of the few exceptions to "ethernet just works on Linux" is unfortunate, but the very small form factor, very low power, and the possibility of installing and booting from flash were big winners. The fact that it has a parallel port AND the port on the other side with 24 bits of general purpose I/O were huge selling points to me. It'd make a very powerful and small integrated LinuxCNC controller. I followed the link you provided to the manufacturer's site. They don't sell the NCbox-189, so I followed their links to several of their distributors, and they didn't seem to be selling it either. So I'd still list availability as a problem, but that's probably a chicken and egg problem that would go away if there was a commitment from the manufacturer to provide long term hardware availability in exchange for a commitment from LinuxCNC developers to provide long term support. As an end user, if it was $200 or less (it should be!) and it was a true plug and play low-latency solution that didn't require patching kernels, then I'd be a potential customer. On 10/09/2012 11:01 AM, Eric Keller wrote: > It still seems to me that the way to go is to have a headless PC doing > the real time and another system doing the user interface. For me, that begs the question: "Is the user interface so burdensome that the realtime operating system can't allocate top priority to the realtime job and have enough left over for the user interface?" Or, stated differently, is there enough benefit to having two processors to justify the expense and complexity of such a system if one processor can generally get the job done with plenty of computing horsepower in reserve? YouTube isn't a critical application on my machines. Sure, it'd be convenient, and maybe a little geeky fun, to watch YouTube videos and read posts at BuildLog.net, CNC Zone, or the LinuxCNC forums while executing G code in realtime, but if it caused any problem, I have plenty of other options to surf and watch videos in the shop, including my iPod Touch which can easily be with me at any machine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
