Need recommendations - Tiny PC W/PCI slot

I'm trying to plan out my next purchase in the neverending retrofit on my Lagun CNC, and after talking for a long while with Mesa today I think that instead of trying to get an ethernet based FPGA card like their 7i80HD working with beta drivers, I'm going to go instead with a Mesa 5i20 + 7137TA + 7i29 + 7i29.

That said, I don't have a real big cabinet to work with for all this stuff and I feel more comfortable getting a real tiny PC and putting it inside the Nema cabinet on my mill with a short set of cables to run from the 5i20 to the IO and servo drive daughterboards.

I have almost no experience whatsoever with PC's with a form factor smaller than ATX, but I'm looking for something with as tiny a case as possible and still have a full height PCI slot (or can modify the case for such) for the 5i20. I don't need any CD/DVD drive or parallel port, but would like a network port, onboard video that won't give linuxCNC fits and prefer fanless if possible.

I hate to ask for answers but newegg doesn't have filters for all these parameters Thanks!

Hi

I don't use Mesa boards so am not the one to answer your query

I am pretty sure that Andy has a D2700 or D2800 he uses with such boards, will wait for him to chime in.
The preferred D525 is becoming near impossible to find now.

regards

A person on the emc-users list just posted good results with the
Gigabyte GA-350N mini ITX board, with the exception that
he needed to use the VESA graphic driver

This afternoon I got this little machine up ASRock AD525PV3 atom
neat little setup with Mesa 5i20 card.

ok so setting up is a little bit of a ...... but follow the excellent installing a lower Rev then upgrading to 2.5.2 and it is the puppy
it would need a tall rise due to the phone socket/USB and printer port stacks, unless one can get a handed riser to point out....

a ribbon cable riser would be the thing if any one knows of such.

the board came with 2gig, this will be moved to 4 or 8. The board can handle 8.
but i recommend buying extra DIMMs the memory is the main thing to go down and as the cp gets old (like a few years)
you will find it cheaper to buy in to the next level tech. unless you stock up now.

this comes from finding to older mem now cost 3 to 4 times that when it was first out

anyway I'vw now preset the machine to start up on either parallel port for my lathe, Montec, or Mesa cards

enjoy
regards
G

This afternoon I got this little machine up ASRock AD525PV3 atom

Sounds a good card, another of the 525's

....the board came with 2gig, this will be moved to 4 or 8. The board can handle 8.

Be aware that 32 bit systems can only see and use 3.25GB max.
There is no 64 bit version of Linuxcnc and no plans to make one I am aware of.

There is also a problem with the Ubuntu installer. If it detects > 2GB when you are installing from the Live CD, it removes the rtai kernel and installs the pae one.
This caused us no end of hair pulling a while back until we chanced upon what was triggering it and why.

regards

to true, the use of 2meg plus allows for max out for graphic shared mem. both my other machine run like this already.
ok 8gigs a bit ott

but buy space!!! I've done that also with the mother boards, cant beat just popping in the loft and pulling the spare down when it goes pop!! and they do go pop!!! or fizz or just ....... like wise spare psu.

perhaps if I had a 20deg controlled toolroom, might ge away with it.

part of my prob it I play with carbon fibre, and that gets in to make S/C

thanks for the advise
Gd