Pathpilot MiniPC

thefabricator03 wrote: With your Mini PC Rod, Can you set it up in the bios to turn on when AC power is sensed?

Yes it does. I'm a bit naughty becasue I have not turned a PC off for about 20 years. I just turn off the control box overnight. Next day, I turn it back on and restart LCNC to reconnect to the 7i76e

I like the idea of a small PC running the software. How would you compare the performance for your small PC to say that of a run of the mill desktop machine. Is there much noticeable lag compared to a normal sized machine?

thefabricator03 wrote: I like the idea of a small PC running the software. How would you compare the performance for your small PC to say that of a run of the mill desktop machine. Is there much noticeable lag compared to a normal sized machine?

Not with the mesa ethernet hardware. You've still got all the latency issues to sort out but with Mesa hardware stepping, the latency requirements are substantially relaxed so its not a drama. It also runs sheetcam perfectly. I mount the PC behind the monitor as it comes with a Vesa bracket. I also have a Gigabyte N3160 (next version of the J1900) on my packing bench as the monitor is wall mounted so everything is up and out of the road. It struggles a bit with Win10 with 4 gb RAM, I've been meaning to upgrade the RAM to 8gb but it works for what that PC does. The last time I was on a PC shop, they did not have the right RAM for it. It will still run Photoshop and Lightroom which I use for photo processing if you are patient! You can get other Gigabyte Brix with a lot more grunt but they hurt the wallet more! I think that would be a good way to go if you have to support Windows.

I recieved the GB-BXBT-1900 yesterday and loaded PP 2.0 onto it. all went well until reboot. get the tormach splash screen, see X starting up, have a black display with mouse pointer then it goes blank, no pointer no nothing.

getting into GRUB and adding NOMODESET get past this. have yet to find any alternative to using that option.

got it loading mate and not starting PP also for now set PATHPILOT_SIM_MODE=1 in ~/.bashrc since it's not yet attached to any hardware.

make changes to grub to make the NOMODESET permament.

everything is starting fine this way.

also my display is this one from amazon
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N4LB7FT/ref..._title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

one tweak to ~/tmc/scripts/detecttouch.py (might have the script name wrong as its from memory) to add my touch screen and all worked well

i did a latency test with and without the wifi module
with was ~350000nS
without was ~86000nS
that was with glxgears running 6x, and a youtube video playing @ 1024 res in both cases. was also wired to network over ethernet

The wifi latency is to expected based on my own experience and also what was reported by PCW back when I set my machine up a few years ago. Just pop a USB wifi dongle in. I used the Asus Nano which I had already and it just worked.

I installed Linux Mint and compiled the PREMPT_RT kernel (17.3 I think).

I never had issues with booting and when I added a touch screen, it just came up with no input from me.

@rodw Would you mind putting the contents of your /boot/grub/grub.conf here so I can see it. I'm wondering if it has NOMODESET or if its using something else to over come the issue I'm having.