Odroid H2

Curious if anyone else is running one of these x86_64 SBCs. I picked one up to try on my project machine. If it weren't for all the crazy issues with getting random ARM boards running an RT patched kernel and various GPU issues I'd be running that root by now but for a small machine control PC this thing is hard to beat. I've been Running Mint 19 and 2.8pre1 on it for about a month.

I can't speak on the board's latency but with an RT-preempt kernel and Mesa eth boards I've never been terribly concerned. The processor is decent on this thing and it conveniently has 2 gigabit Ethernet ports and some GPIO pins. A DDR4 SODIMM and a small NVME drive and this thing is all in for less than $200. I pickup all my little SBC's at ameridroid.com but these are still pretty hot so getting ahold of one is a bit of a wait.

Odroid H2

thanks nice item
but at that price you get a real full PC system
not only a board item

agree on a small powerfull setup
the tiny thinkpad do the job also for less then 30USD

pl7i92 wrote:

thanks nice item
but at that price you get a real full PC system
not only a board item

agree on a small powerfull setup
the tiny thinkpad do the job also for less then 30USD

If your goal were just to use a used laptop there's nothing wrong with that for an RTpreempt kernel/mesa hardware. Personally that's not how I build machines. I like to stuff the smallest fully functional PC into an electrical cabinet that I can, run monitor cables and whatever else to the operator area and never see the PC again until I open the cabinet. A laptop in an open environment with it's fan sucking in dust is kind of meh to me. I use an aluminum cased small industrial PC on my mill and this thing is smaller than that, still passively cooled and alot more powerful (that uses a J1900 I think). This is a good alternative to something like a NUC because you can just drill 4 holes in an enclosure add some standoffs and mount the board with the storage and everything else attached. Not really a replacement for an Ebay laptop, that's a different build.

Too little compared to what? Are we talking used Ebay stuff or NUCs that cost 4-8x as much? I can't think of anything priced better than an $111 PC + a stick of ram and an NVME or eMMC drive.

So what's the ideal PC to stick inside a 1ton machine, as if the size of the PC made a difference? Parallel ports are are as archaic for running a Machine these days as they are for running a printer so I'm curious what the "ideal" PC is for a 1ton machine. Modern machine control is a CPU using some means of talking to microcontrollers and FPGAs that are far more predictable than any x86 CPU will ever be anymore with it's bloated legacy instructions. The size of the PC is a silly thing to mention these days, an NVME drive is the fastest storage available yet its the size of a stick of gum so the size of the PC is relative.

Honestly this board is a stopgap for me, I'd much rather use ARM boards for machine control, if the ecosystem were right that's where I'd be. This coming from someone that just got done building a 3900x workstation "just because", but I certainly don't intend on running machines off it, that has a different purpose.

It's basically a Celeron J4105 with a small form factor. Takes a single 15V power input.
Has everything integrated on the board. Compared to my current Q1900 mini-itx board,
this one would reduce the size, get rid of the pico-psu and the separate ssd.
So I would think this is a rather clean system and something to consider, among all the other options.

Exactly.

My one absolute requirement is that I can run the PC off of the DC power supply,

I had a J1900 Industrial PC on this machine in the beginning, which is fine for a mill or anything really, had 2 1gb ethernet ports and a bunch of serial ports and it just took 12v on a barrel connector. I use machine vision cameras and when they would start to display the processor would get hit hard and the latency would spike.

The I built a ITX with an HDplex DC-DC power supply and an AMD A10 9800k. No problems with that other than it's a 95w CPU in a small case so I had to use full copper server blower cooler that sounded like an airplane when the cameras came on.

Surprisingly enough this seems plenty strong for my machine with the camera's and that machine is not a large machine so the smaller the better as long as it can handle the cameras. The J1900 got sent to my Mill which it does absolutely fine running the commutation on a brushless spindle motor with a 7i96 and I'll build something more suitable with the A10 board.

I would have bought the Odroid H2 anyway, I'm on a kick to stuff as many small computers albeit ARM, or x86 in just about everything. I know you can pickup used hardware dirt cheap, I can build about 8 systems as it is myself with all the PC hardware I have in the closet, but that wasn't really the point. There's certainly nothing wrong with using old hardware, I just didn't expect the replies about using older stuff when I posted this. The fact that you can use old hardware is a give in, but looking for something new it's pretty hard to beat this little board. I VNC into the machine almost exclusively for dev work so the fact that it has 2 NICs onboard is pretty convenient so I don't have to bother with a dongle since otherwise the onboard NIC is dedicated to the Mesa eth board.

NICE
CAN you make a quick tutorial on how you did it in a NEW tread so people can get this redone
by there own on the now given software maybe

Reproducing somthing is offen more complicated that a new setup

im With you as you DID it and someone shoudt have done it to prove
YOU DID Well

It doesn't really need a tutorial like an ARM board or something that's difficult, it's a normal X86.

I usually compile a new RT patched kernel, but I was having issues getting the normal GCC compiler to work, my environment was stuck using the Linaro ARM compiler for some reason.

Tommylight's post with the kernal deb is all I wound up doing for this ATM
forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...nd-easy-installation