Beagleboard x15 and LinuxCNC

Hi All,

Would the BeagleBoard x15 be any good for running LinuxCNC with Ethernet based Mesa cards? I am basically looking for some very small computer with good latency and a graphics chip good enough to play 1080p videos while operating the CNC machine at the same time and not affect its performance.
Would the BeagleBoard be good enough for this or should I get something different? What latency results can I expect from this single board PC?

Don't play videos on the same machine you running a cnc machine with, actually don't do anything else with it whilst it controlling a machine.
Geesh the x15 is not a cheap option.

Grab a cheap PC and use the MESA kit & Linuxcnc and consider something else for watching videos. You might even be able to press a cheapish "smart tv" into service.

Thanks for the advice. What I like about the x15 is the size, I wanted to have the controller PC as small as possible. Would it still be good with the latency though if not playing the videos? I dont mind paying a little extra to have the PC smaller as long as the latency is good. What alternative small PC would you recommend?

Beaglebone Black and Machinekit is an option.

ATM I'm migrating from my BBB & Machinekit to an ITX board and Linuxcnc, the support via the forums for Linuxcnc is thousands of times better than Machinekit

Thank you. So I found out that the J3355B-ITX is a small mini ITX board that is meant to be good for linuxcnc as it offers really nice latency but it only has one ethernet port which means I would have no internet connection if the Mesa card is connected. Does anyone know about a similar mini-ITX board equally good with 2 ethernet ports?

Here is the link to the ASRock J3355B-ITX :
www.newegg.com/global/ie/Product/Product...Item=N82E16813157726

Why do you need to hook up your dedicated CNC PC to internet?

dom96 wrote:

Thank you. So I found out that the J3355B-ITX is a small mini ITX board that is meant to be good for linuxcnc as it offers really nice latency but it only has one ethernet port which means I would have no internet connection if the Mesa card is connected. Does anyone know about a similar mini-ITX board equally good with 2 ethernet ports?

Here is the link to the ASRock J3355B-ITX :
www.newegg.com/global/ie/Product/Product...Item=N82E16813157726

I use a second PCIe card for the interface for my mesa card, a TP-LINK TG3468 uses the same chipset, unfortunately it doesn't come with a low-profile bracket, but not an issue as I'm putting everything in a customised enclosure. I've renamed the interfaces lan0 for the network and mesa0 for the connection to the 7i92 I'm using.
There is a AsRock mini itx board on newegg with 2 ports, a bit more $$$ and doesn't come with a parallel port, nice to have as an option.

I often listen to youtube while turning, it's a Gigabyte GA-Z170N Wifi with i3-6100, two ethernet ports and built in wifi. Internet comes via Wifi. That works fine.

I tested BBB and machinekit some years ago and unless things have changed the graphics is painfully slow and the memory is limited so CAM prepared files from F360 are often too large. It is a quite limited machine. With that pricetag I don't see any reason to use Beaglebone X15.

A month ago I installed a new milling machine and went for Gigabyte GA-J3455N which actually has two ethernet ports. But there was something wrong with the one I got, wouldn't even show bios screen, so replaced it with a ASrock Q1900-ITX . Only one ethernet port so Wifi is via USB wifi dongle. This works pretty nice but I don't run youtube on that one. Had to use isolcpuis=2,3 to get stable latency.

I use 7i76E on both linuxcnc systems by the way.

The main reason I wanted to have an internet connection on this PC was to be able to download the g-code files from the cloud and ocasionally get some work related info from google.