I would like to know what computers that everyone is using to run and design on your Shapeoko? the one that holds up to all the dust, ram, and memory you might need to keep your designs.
Thank you,
Pete
Refurbished mini computer. Works great and plenty powerful! Its mounted under the table so the dust hasn’t bothered it. I blow it out every few weeks. I’m in Florida in unconditioned garage and that’s been fine also.
I use an HP laptop that has the I7 processor and 16gb ram. It has a solid state drive that is 500gb and I have 23gb free. This is my 3rd HP and all have been very dependable. The only reason this is my 3rd is I kept outgrowing them and gave them to relatives. This last one I bought an I7 when my last 2 were I5. I figured I might as well get the fastest processor. Besides my Shapeoko I am an avid digital photographer and process pictures with Affinity Photo. Never had a problem with speed or anything with my HP laptops. It is portable and I do give presentations at my woodworking club so it is handy to have it portable. Plus when I travel it is handy that it is portable.
I have had mini computers that were dedicated to the shop but I dont find them as versatile because they are not portable. Plus having everything on one computer is handy. However having everything on one laptop is a single point of failure so I use Norton to back to some external drives and to the cloud so if I ever have a failure or loss of my laptop all my files are recoverable.
I use a desktop for most of my design work. In the workshop, I use an older model Surface Pro. It is powerful enough that I can easily make changes to my designs in the workshop, and then immediately try them on the machine.
To transfer things between the two computers, I just use Dropbox. All my CNC stuff is up there, so it mirrors seemlessly. I’m on the free plan, and I’m only using 50% of my available storage.
Note the difference .
As @mhotchin uses a very limited pc for Carbide Motion for communicating with the Carbdie3D hardware. A second computer is used for design work.
Carbide Create is not a resource hog, but uses the CPU more than a graphics card ( which still helps, avoid the Intel GPU ).
Design work with something like Solidworks or Fusion will require more resources.
Actually, the Surface Pro is surprisingly performant. The only ‘real’ problem I have is that CC works way better with a mouse than with a touchpad. Any editing using CC has never been a problem.