choosing a compatible tablet for a commercial cnc

Well, im getting myself into some trouble

Since I have no shop to work on my brother tapping centers, ive redesigned one of the Xzero CNC routers from the ground up with the original machinist and am almost ready to start building the first run. The last loose end is the control

Ive looked at basically every premade control from the $200 DDCSV2.1 all the way up to the $2000+ delta, lnc, and siemens controls. Because of what im trying to do with this machine feature wise, the cheaper controls don't really suit, and even the expensive controls take a lot of effort and move the machine into too high a price bracket.

So, despite my fighting with linuxcnc on the brothers using the old analogue drives, it may be the right solution for this machine, which will use pulse and direction for everything including the servo spindle.

Alright enough rambling. This machine is very small and i don't want it to have a big separate PC attached to it. I want the control to be "integrated" like a regular industrial machine would. This means some sort of tiny panel PC or tablet. Im looking at some of the low cost convertible notebooks and am trying to figure out which would behave well with linuxcnc and a mesa card. I assume none of the Samsung android tablets could be reinstalled with linuxcnc?

Does anyone have any recommendations of what PC will work well and with which mesa gear? Should be small cheap and current. Im imagining the 7i96 with a notebook that has an ethernet jack is the safe bet, but many of the new notebooks / tablets don't have the rj45 jack.


thanks!

Notebooks probably won't work as they have too much power saving that can't be disabled.

Whats wrong with an USFF PC like the Gigabyte Brix J1900 or N3160 and an ethernet mesa card? Thats what I use and it mounts to the VESA connector on the back of the monitor. I would prefer to have one with dual NIC's

Otherwise look for a 12 volt powered motherboard and wire it into the control panel as if it was just another component but this makes no sense to use an ethernet card.

The problem with a mini pc or mini itx board is:
1 - where to put it. this machine wont have a cabinet, psu is under the table where theres not much room for anything else and drives are integrated inside the motors. So the separate tower is annoying. (for reference, i have a pair of Lenovo usff's on my desk which are my test controls)
2: then you need a monitor, keyboard, etc to go with it. It adds up to quite a lot of money to basically build whats already inside a $299us asus transformer.
3: mini pc i am a bit shy of. I bought a zotac mini and it lasted all of 3 weeks before it refused to post for no reason. They seem to be not built for surviving anything other than an air conditioned room sitting on a desk.

So the assumption is we cant turn off the power saving / throttling crap in the little notebooks? Seems a likely scenario. My msi i7 notebook cant turn it off and when you try to force it with trickery it just overheats.

I'm also reading that the mesa card doesn't like ethernet adapters, so that rules out all the cheap chrome books etc.

Are there any intel/x86 raspberry pi equivalents? all the nice pico/nano itx boards cost $350+. I don't see anything cheap and tiny.

Thanks

i just found this

www.pipo-store.com/pipo-x11-mini-pc-tv-box.html
that might be exactly what we want. a hybrid tablet and mini pc smushed together and very cheap.

how happy will it be with linuxcnc though. could be worth just buying and trying and if it doesn't work just use it for something else.

I would expect any tablet will be in the notebook category and unusable. Look for a Lilliput 7" touch screen and use one of the Brix Pc's I've got 2 of them and they have not been a problem.

I'm writing this on a Brix in Windows and its mounted out of sight on the back of the monitor. Also Keyboard etc should not be a drama. Use a wireless set and use Gmoccappy with small touch screen so you won't need the keyboard often.

brix pcs are much too large to fit anywhere easily actually. putting on the back of the monitor id need to make some sort of case, again ending up 2-3 times the cost of that pipo machine. they also have a fan which is a no go.


That pipo is NOT a tablet btw, there is no battery, so im not sure if it will have any power issues. i don't think it should be any different than a regular mini pc. (the sell the same one with no screen). i found some reference on the net of using it with mach3 and a smoothstepper, but that's not necessarily meaningful.

The Brix is only 115mm x 105mm x 60mm. You could mount it under your bench with the supplied mount. Pretty sure the two I have are fanless but the higher specced CPU's probably have a fan.

Not sure you've understood the issue here. It cannot be separate from the machine. Full stop. It has to either mount on an arm cleanly as a panel, or tuck under the table. The brix is not viable for either case, it is both too wide and too tall.

Under the table is already quite full with the psu and the mesa card.