PCs and Dust

Generally PCs and dust do not go together very well . I'm a newbie preparing to set up my first CNC router/PC system. It appears to me I have 2 options - but experienced CNCers out there may be able to offer other solutions - so here goes.

Either I run my CAD/CNC PC from inside the house and run the Parallel Port cable into the workshop. Parallel Comms do not generally like long cable lengths - so probably restricted to about 7m length - but that's OK. In the workshop I will run a Raspberry Pi computer inside a dust-proof box and link this to the main PC via either wireless or ethernet VNC so that I can control the main PC (and the CNC operations) from the Raspberry Pi. Keyboards, Mice and Screens in the workshop are more easily kept dust free as they don't need cooling.

Alternatively (and easier) I run my desktop CNC router inside a perspex box with a vacuum dust extractor. I can then use a spare PC in the workshop as the CNC controller with my main house-bound PC as the CAD/test CNC developer.

How do other CNCers deal with this problem?

I have not had any issue with dust in my old pc on my router.

I am getting ready to replace the motherboard and update to the latest 2.7 version of LinuxCNC. When I replace the motherboard I am going to use a fanless cpu motherboard. Either a J1800 or J1900. You could put this in an enclosed box and not worry about dust. Might want to give it a little bit of breathing space in the enclosed box. It would be best if the box were made of metal to allow the air inside the box to cool through natural convection from the box.

iv'e not had any problems with dust , apart from occasionally going in the pc with a vac and knocking the dust out
or gently teasing the dust out etc .

however apart from the point of the temp climbing up , and reminding me to clean it
dust wont do any harm

one thing i do on my installs is to fit an extra fan or 2
and have one pushing air in and the other extracting , does help

I have had very heavy dust buildup in mine with no problems. I took it outside to blow out the dust.