Chromebook and LinuxCNC

smplc wrote: The Mesa 7i76e appears to be a breakout board and not a motion controller.

LinuxCNC is the motion controller.
The 7i76E is a bit more than a breakout, as it connects via Ethernet (like a smoothstepper) and has on-board processing to handle GPIO,spindle control and step generation.

The 7i76 is very similar but connects via the 5i25 PCI card and a DB25 cable (bit the interface is not parallel-port)

Understood. Would a laptop with an ethernet port, smoothstepper and BIOS flash disk do then?

No, because there is no LinuxCNC driver or the Smoothstepper.

However, the Mesa 7i76E offers very much the same capabilities for only $20 more.
Unlike the Smoothstepper the 7i76E supports 24V IO without any further breakouts being needed and is expandable to up to 768 IO points with extra plug-in cards if necessary.

Config: Est yr 2014 HP 15 Notebook w/Win 8 OS>Mach4 Hobby/Industrial>Warp9 ESS>C10 BOB>KL-4030 Micro Step Drivers

Boot USB and Debian OS instead.

I haven't loaded Debian OS with HP 15 Notebook yet.

What driver of particular were you referring? Is the HP ethernet port not compatible with LinuxCNC even if using a smoothstepper?

HP has boot configuration options and legacy mode. At startup BIOS option and select USB. Debian OS pending and hung today. Maybe unable to locate device. I'll have to investigate.

I might be willing to obtain an enclosed mini PC and some additional hardware if anymore compatible and fits budget. I'd like to conserve already equipment meantime if compatible. I do like how compact and isolated the enclosed mini PCs are.

smplc wrote: Config: Est yr 2014 HP 15 Notebook w/Win 8 OS>Mach4 Hobby/Industrial>Warp9 ESS>C10 BOB>KL-4030 Micro Step Drivers

Will become HP Laptop -> Linux OS -> LinuxCNC -> Mesa 7i76e -> JKL-4030 Drivers.

It is possible to plug a Parallel port BOB into the 7i76e but you loose all of the benefits of the vastly superior Mesa hardware.You would be far better off rewiring to the Mesa step gens and I/O ports.

I think you are still missing something. You CANNOT use a Warp9 ESS smoothstepper with LinuxCNC. Its a piece of hardware built to address the inadequacies of Mach3/4 and Windows and IS NOT SUPPORTED under LinuxCNC. The reason why its not supported is that its not required as LinuxCNC does not have the weaknesses that it was designed to fix in Mach.

As Andy said, the Mesa 7i76e is vastly superior and only a few $ more.

smplc wrote: I might be willing to obtain an enclosed mini PC and some additional hardware if anymore compatible and fits budget. I'd like to conserve already equipment meantime if compatible. I do like how compact and isolated the enclosed mini PCs are.

An alternative is just to view the PC motherboard as one more component, and mount it in the electrical panel.

Example.

That is a Mini-ITX motherboard (one that takes a single 12V input) with a Mesa 5i24 mounted on an "over the top" PCI riser and a stack of 7i84, 7i44 and 7i49 cards. For storage there is an 8GB SATA DOM module (£20) plugged directly into an SATA port.
8GB seems plenty for the OS and a sane number of G-code files.