linuxcnc 2.9.2 (live) on the intel n100 cpu

And that's his TMALL store front/contact. Worth perhaps searching Alibaba for 2U/3U/4U/5U units, and that will send you near that same guy. Hope this helps for now. 


[img]https://i.postimg.cc/yxMhJ7h6/tmall.png [/img]

How you buy from taobao? use translator and made account ?
taobao sellers send items to europe and what about vat/taxes ?
Because in aliexpress you prepay vat/taxes and items not stuck in customs for long time. Maybe is cheaper the taobao compared to aliexpress but if you don't know chinese is difficult.
All these chinese sellers buy from the same source the malls in shenzhen.

I'm mainland based, w/ a domestic sim card, which you need to reg on taobao to my limited knowledge. Unless they changed that policy since, I wouldn't know. I read and speak mandarin, just can't write much without software assist though...

Alibaba's fine. I think. Just shoot out that visual I passed over to a few stores and they'll get you sorted. To be honest though, it's all the same hardware/mb/cpu designs really - just different colors and passives that's all.

I believe I have the same N100 mini PC. Here are the results of my stress testing, running for a couple of hours with 8 glxgears, two YouTube videos constantly playing, working with FreeCAD for my new machine design, and doing some compiling in the background.

I running on Debian 13 (Trixie, weekly build; so far absolutely stable despite being not released yet), running KDE and LinuxCNC 2.9.3-1+b2

 

Hi, just been reading this post and I’m looking for a linuxcnc pc to use with my 7i95t. I kind of get the gist of what is going on, but could you provide a link to one of these pcs please.
Could you also provide steps I would need to take to turn off all the unnecessary options or settings, to make it as streamlined as the thread is indicating please.
I am a noob to this cnc hobby and I’m currently in the learning a steep curve process of cnc.
I’ve just bought a cnc of fleabay that I am planning to upgrade and learn the ropes.
The current board in their is the CPO-10V which I am going to change to the 7i95t and run linuxcnc on this new mini industrial pc.
Like many most likely before me I have great plans for this cnc, only time will tell if most of them come off

Hi Wrightys99, if you want the same mini-PC that I have, go to Aliexpress and seach for "T8 N100". The result will show many of these mini PCs, sold under different brand names, like Chatree, Firebat, or no name at all. Mine has no name. As far as I can tell they are all the same. Just pick the cheapest with your preferred configuration. I bought mine for around €150,- with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Make sure it has the N100 processor, not the older N5095. Although I ordered it without an OS, it came with Windows 11 pre-installed and activated at no extra cost. So I just made the system dual-boot where I can use Windows for tuning my servo drives, as many servo drives come with Windows tuning software.
Below are some pics.
As for the most optimal settings, I will have to check how I modified the BIOS setting. Please allow me to follow-up with a separate post on that. As for isolcpus (boot config parameters) using isolcpus=1,2,3 gives by far the lowest latency, but at the expense of a slightly affected responsiveness of the system in case you want to run other tasks in addition to LinuxCNC, like YouTube or so. But since this PC will be a machine controller, it is recommended not to use it for anything else than LinuxCNC and not have it connected to the internet, certainly not during machine operation. What I typically do is use isolcpus=2,3 during system configuration, e.g. when building a new machine or modifying an existing machine, where I sometimes have to check online resources, and once the configuration is done switch back to isolcpus=1,2,3. But using isolcpus=2,3 still gives latencies that are low enough for using LinuxCNC, so setting it to 1,2,3 is not even needed. But many of us just love the fact that the system is running with the lowest latencies possible   Just make sure that the latency settings (max jitter) in your machine configuration matches the correct isolcpus settings. If the latency (max jitter) was determined with using isolcpus=1,2,3 and you run the machine with isolcpus=2,3, you could potentially encounter some issues. So if you want to run the machine with isolcpus=2,3, then also determine the max jitter with that setting and enter those results into your machine configuration.
For easily modifying boot parameters such as isolcpus, I typically use the program grub-customizer, which I find a bit more convenient than using the command line (sudo vi /etc/default/grub).
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As a PS: I am currently running LinuxCNC 2.10 on Debian 13 (both pre-release versions). Although XFCE is the de facto standard Desktop Environment for LinuxCNC, in my experience KDE nowadays performs slightly better with lower latencies. Gnome, Cinnamon and others are usually worse.
As for latencies: please do not be too obsessed with low latency numbers. Only when you are using old style software based step generation or encoder counting, latency (base thread max jitter) can be a critical factor. When using MESA cards and similar solutions, only the servo thread max jitter is relevant and keeping that below 100us is usually good practice. I always keep it below 50us and never encounter any problems. Even without  full BIOS optimization it should be possible to have a very acceptable performance already on this N100 mini-PC. 

Adding my results since this is the most popular thread for 'LinuxCNC N100' on Google Search.

Hardware

• PC: Topton 12th Gen Fanless Mini Computer Alder Lake N100 Quad Core Dual LAN 2 Industrial PC
• Vendor: Topton Direct Store on AliExpress
• Specs: 8GB DDR4, 128GB NVMe, WiFi, BT
• Price: $142.60 total after some Black Friday discounts
• Reason:
  • Old PC gave out due to overheat from dust / woodchips
  • Wanted new and cheap PC compared to the old/used stuff I've been always using.
  • I wanted an out the box, dual NIC device so that I can remote into it from my network and also have it connected to the Mesa Card. I knew about this chipset due to it being popular in the homelab space for those that run their own router (pfSense, OPNsense) since most devices that use this chipset have multiple NICs. Seeing this thread pop up in the search and the low latency results made it an easy choice for me.
  • Fanless, hopefully this prevents overheat in future as it'll be easier for me to clean. Having it now in an easily accessible area due to its small form factor will also help with that.

Latency test command
Results
Lowest Latency Settings - 17.0 microseconds (μs) max

• Test was run on an actual install of LinuxCNC 2.9.3 ISO image (not Live CD)
• The following BIOS settings were Disabled
  • C-States
  • Virtualization
  • *Speed Shift
  • Speed Step
  • Race to Halt
• isolcpus=1,2,3
• *Stress tested single core by running

  yes > /dev/null

• glxgears x 8

Notes

• *Disabling Speed Shift gave me the best results by far, but made PC basically unusable for multi-tasking. I was going to have multiple YouTube videos playing, but trying to load it was unbearable so I decided just to stress test the CPU using the command line. With Speed Shift enabled made the PC great for multi-tasking but my latency increased to a steady 50 μs running glxgears x 8 and 2 Youtube videos. I don't intend on using this PC for anything else besides LinuxCNC, but it is cool to know I can multi-task on it while it is running as 50 μs suitable with a Mesa card.
• Live CD proportionally gets worse results by about ~15 μs. The same test above got me 30 μs.
• I was not able to install LinuxCNC 2.8.4 image due to a lot of driver issues. I was hoping to do a brainless PC swap, but I guess this gave me reason to upgrade.

 

Overall this is a cool little device, see attachments for pics. My biggest worry is buying a PC from an unknown OEM and future BIOS support. I guess we'll see if this stands the test of time. Otherwise, I am going back to my old, go-to, decommissioned Enterprise PCs.

Did you try isolcpus=3

isolcpus 1,2,3 leaves only one CPU for non-realtime tasks so
would likely be painfully slow...

I ran many tests on my N100 system with the latest official LinuxCNC distro (2.9.3), using the KDE Plasma desktop with Wayland, and these were the latency test results of the different Grub kernel parameter settings, while running two YouTube videos, 8 glxgears, and playing around with the system:

quiet isolcpus=0,1         max servo thread jitter= 46.7us
quiet isolcpus=2,3         max servo thread jitter= 14.6us   - Youtube playback interrupted
quiet isolcpus=1,2,3      max servo thread jitter= 11.3us   - Youtube playback severely interrupted
quiet isolcpus=3            max servo thread jitter= 24.5us

quiet irqaffinity=0 isolcpus=0,1         max servo thread jitter= 152.2us
quiet irqaffinity=0 isolcpus=2,3         max servo thread jitter= 17.5us   - Youtube playback somewhat interrupted
quiet irqaffinity=0 isolcpus=1,2,3      max servo thread jitter= 6.0us     - Youtube playback severely interrupted
quiet irqaffinity=0 isolcpus=3            max servo thread jitter= 13.7us

This last option gave me the best overall results. A responsive system and very decent latency. However, I noticed a few times a complete system freeze..... Oops..... It seems to me this is related to KDE and/or Wayland. I did some quick tests under XFCE, and the latency results really look quite different. I will do more extensive testing within the next few days with XFCE, and post the results here. I will also test with using the irqbalance daemon instead of using irqaffinity=0 parameter, which thus far gave me mixed but interesting results.