Yesterday I decided I needed yet another PC to do a test install of the LiveCD (as I did not want to wipe my triple-booting test machine which has all the Mesa cards on it, and my old D510MO was demonstrating why it is no longer my mill controller.
I bought the cheapest x86 machine that Amazon had on same-day delivery (ordered at 1100, arrived 1830) which turned out to be: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B089RDVP7F Though at the time I ordered it the price was £84 delivered (€92, $109, 1825ZAR) as it was on a flash deal. It has 4GB ram, a 64GB SSD and comes with Windows 10 pre-installed and UEFI LinuxCNC installation hit two minor bumps, which is the main reason for this email. 1) The Wifi chip needs proprietary drivers. The installer does not appear to know how to get these. 2) Installation of Grub2 failed the first time. Google suggested that it would succeed if the machine had a network connection, and by plugging in an ethernet connection the process went smoothly. Having installed LinuxCNC and the Buster preempt kernel, the latency is, well, unspectacular. It runs at about 120uS or 120,000nS which is certainly not good enough for hardware stepping, but with no parallel port or other GPIO this isn't really relevant. It ought to work with a Mesa ethernet card but that is not yet tested. It's tiny. About as thick as a Pi and twice as wide. It comes with a bracket to mount it on the back of a monitor or TV. -- atp "A motorcycle is a bicycle with a pandemonium attachment and is designed for the especial use of mechanical geniuses, daredevils and lunatics." — George Fitch, Atlanta Constitution Newspaper, 1912 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
