Selecting a Motherboard/processor for Ethernet Mesa cards

I have an Asrock J3455B motherboard/CPU combo already, and it's painfully slow when running any graphic environment.

I am building a 3+1 axis machine, initially a 3 axis machine with a servo-driven spindle, and later a 4th axis trunnion. This means I'll eventually have 5 STMBL servo drivers all speaking to the machine, plus a 7i73 panel controller, *possibly* two 7i73. I intend to put things like cycle start, cycle stop, hold/single-step, MPG wheel, and some softkeys on the 7i73, so that I can avoid touching a touchscreen with oily/coolant-ey/chippy hands.

Since I'm going to be running the Ethernet based cards (7i94 most likely, I also have a 7i96 that *probably* won't be used now) are there newer/other ITX form-factor motherboards out there that will have a bit more power to handle the graphical environment?

What distro\desktop are you using.

I was running Mint 19.x and XFCE and saw no issues with graphics on a J3355B with 8GB ram (swapped to an Odroid H2). That was with a 7i92/7i76/7i73 combo.

To be brutally honest as long as the machine cuts the part accurately and does so reliably I don't get hung up on any fancy GUI features. Keep everything simple and just use the machine to cut. The only network connection I have going whilst cutting is the one for the MESA hardware.
J3455B is a Quad core Celeron @ 1.5GHz and the J3355B is a Dual core @ 2.0GHz, but GPU is the same. Just for reference.

Wouldn't surprise me if it is using software rendering if it is that slow.
My j1900 celeron works fine, doesn't feel particularly slow even if it is not the fastest in the world.
Only when working with 100,000-s lines of code the graphics preview rendering may be a bit sluggish
and loading the file can take a few seconds.
I also have a Gigabyte Z170 with an Intel I3-6100 and it is a bit snappier, but not that one has to have it.

If it helps, I have made a prototype breakout board shield for the 7i73 that also connects to the GPIO on an Odroid H2+. We have RS485 on board for plasma and VFD's, another Serial port and an extra USB connector. The last connector arrived today so I'll know soon if I got it right! I am going to use an industrial 6 axis wireless pendant (not USB) for the MPG as I have one on my plasma machine.

It won't be a cheap board as there are so many connectors as you know... Feedback welcome.






I was planning for this to be a seperate HMI with another control box on the machine for motor drivers and other mesa cards.

Looks good.
Glad you got all your bits and pieces.
Those push connectors work great once you get the hang, I found the boot lace ferrules make the job a lot easier, just a little extra labour to crimp them on but so much easier if you need to change things around.

BeagleBrainz wrote:

Looks good.
Glad you got all your bits and pieces.
Those push connectors work great once you get the hang, I found the boot lace ferrules make the job a lot easier, just a little extra labour to crimp them on but so much easier if you need to change things around.

Thanks for the feedback. The bootlace ferrules I have are 8mm long and they need to be 10mm to get a good grip so you reminded me there is something else to order
They were the only connector I could find that had stackable headers. but the price is not too bad..

Would an i3-3220 based system be acceptable? I see where there are hundreds available from an Ebay tech reseller, based on an Aaeon industral motherboard.

I'm already thinking about getting one to use as a file server, and the manufacturer claims they're built for industrial automation. They do have a TPM module, which may not be a good thing for latency.

I think you first should make sure that the celeron computer is using graphics hardware acceleration, Here is one way to do that unix.stackexchange.com/questions/963/how...eleration-is-enabled

In this clip you can see the performance of the RPi4

. A celeron will be quicker than that. In my world a celeron is perfectly fine and the graphics performance suits a linuxcnc monitor well. The i3-3220 should be faster on paper but it also comes with a cpu fan.

The fan isn't an issue, it's bolted to a big heavy loud vertical machining center!

The i3 will probably get setup in my fileserver project as it's got a 16x PCIe card, which is needed to run the RAID controller. The Celery does not.

I've brought the Celery in the house to fool around with for a bit, and try to get it working properly. Pretty soon I'll need to start laying out the control box for the machine and getting the stepper motor drivers configured, I've got half a dozen STMBL drives assembled now, just working through the assembly troubleshooting and firmware programming. My STM32F4's came with preflashed firmware, so I have to program them via SWD to get the initial STMBL bootloader installed.

The fan noise isn't the issue in a machine, the problem is it's tendency to collect dirt and be a mechanical failure point.