Odroid H2

I tend to use 12V powered Mini-ITX boards, as I am still enamoured of the PCI bus.
For example www.mini-itx.com/~JNF9T-2930
Has 12V power supply, PCIe, Ethernet and Parallel, so can run any Mesa board except the 7C81.

I guess that's a preference thing, I'm not a huge fan of PCI cards hanging off a motherboard as I'll never use an actual computer case. I think PC104 from a form factor standpoint is ideal, what's actually available price per dollar for CPU boards is not.

The board has a 2 lane m.2 slot for NVME drives underneath. I'm not sure what's out there but some kind of m.2 to PCIE slot where the PCIE card could be mounted somewhat remotely would be interesting. I haven't really found a reason to need PCIE over Ethernet, I think way hm2 eth is implemented for stepgens and such more or less mitigates the difference, as well as makes up for less than ideal latencies as well.

blazini36 wrote: I guess that's a preference thing, I'm not a huge fan of PCI cards hanging off a motherboard as I'll never use an actual computer case.

Nor do I, I tend to use a right-angle riser and a bracket:

photos.app.goo.gl/3DUcoevCmNZQjX47A

Is a mini-ITX + 5i24 on a riser. Then the ribbon cables connect a 7i44 and a 7i49 resolver card. Then the 7i44 is connected to a 7i84 (mounted directly on top of it) for GPIO and MPG. (The yellow cable was replaced by a much shorter link in the final installation)

No eBay APP ID and/or Cert ID defined in Kunena configurationThat's a little more tidy, This isn't the H2 board, but a small industrial PC setup on my mill with a 7i76e..

www.dropbox.com/s/q33gnlklp3yu566/Photo%...0%2002%20PM.jpg?dl=0
www.dropbox.com/s/966k7kyacojdp3h/Photo%...0%2010%20PM.jpg?dl=0

The H2 is smaller still. As for PCIE, if you're using an extension/adapter, there's no reason you can't use it on this either really. The RAM and the M.2 slot sit on the bottom of the board, there's plenty of M.2 to PCIE adapters available you wuold just have to use a SATA drive or eMMC instead of NVME since that slot would be occupied by the PCIE adapter




.I don't have any PCIE mesa cards to try it with, but it should work fine.

I just ordered one of these. I too prefer to just tuck it into a din rail and forget about it. We'll see how it goes.

Another option: I'm using a "Fitlet2" ( fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/ ), which is a tiny, DIN-mountable PC with up to 4 PCIe Ethernet ports. The basic model is a bit over $200, and isn't *that* much bigger than a Raspberry Pi. Out of the box, the latency isn't great, but it's good enough for Mesa or Ethercat hardware. It runs on 12V DC out of the box, and it's apparently possible to special order a ~12-30VDC model, but I didn't want to wait.