Last week, the trusty 10+ year old laptop I have been using to run CM/CNCjs died on me. May it rust in peace. This could have been an opportunity to go for a full-raspberry pi based setup, but I still want to be able to run CM and other Windows stuff. I have also had enough of the laptop’s 13" display limited real estate, which did not work well when having a G-code sender and a large camera feed window open side by side. Anyway, I went for “cheap” and it had been a long time I had not really checked the prices on computer stuff. It turns out I ordered a large 24" display for about $120, and one of those “fanless windows10 mini PCs” for $120 also. That thing is small!
It’s fanless, which I like for quietness as well as because it sits right next to my machine so it will occasionally end up covered in chips.
Performance-wise, it’s obviously very limited, it would die if I tried and launched Fusion360, BUT it handles all G-code senders I have tried just fine, as well as the video feed window, which is everything I needed.
The specific references of the screen and mini PC are irrelevant, there are tons of equivalent models in that price range, I just wanted to share a little testimony since this topic of using a small-form-factor PC comes up from time to time. It does work fine.
I think that’s the perfect setup. I have a similar model running mine. I picked it up used for $50 and bought 2 monitors on facebook marketplace for $15. I’ve thought about getting a 10-12" touchscreen monitor that I’ve been seeing on Amazon for about $120. That should make a nice setup.
Look for one of these used: Dell [P2418HT]. They’re kind of spendy new, I got mine used for about $150, but it’s 24", touch enabled, and pretty much just works. The only trouble I’ve had is dust getting between the bottom bezel and the panel making the display wonky, but a little tape over the edge sealed it up and no problems since. The touch looks like a mouse to the OS, so works fine with linux, windows, etc.
Very cool Julien, I was looking at inexpensive windows 10 tablets with USB. I have some overpowered PC’s running my machines that I would like to free up for some other projects. I was thinking of trying one of these:
Update: while Carbide Motion and UGS work fine, for some reason CNCjs is sloooow. It does work, but there is a lag between clicking a jog button and when the machine actually moves. It’s not the USB comms, because in other senders the jog is instantaneous. I’ll investigate, maybe Node.JS is a little bit too much to handle for the Atom processor and 4GB RAM.
My guess would have been that it’s the browser rather than NodeJS. Is this PC connected to a network? Can you try accessing CNCjs from a different computer?
That’s a very good point, yes the PC is on my local network, and I did have a CNCjs server crash pop-up at some point, so maybe the front-end/client and server part struggle to work together. I’ll try accessing it from another PC. Thanks!
Bought it used but like new on ebay. I knocked up a simple holder out of scraps and hook it on the door of my enclosure inside when setting up and outside when running . Works great and its quite powerful for such a small thing.
I was very sad that Fujitsy switched away from Wacom EMS (to Wacom AES?) for the stylus for that unit — my Stylistic ST4121 was one of my favourite computers ever, and the longest last (jury’s still out — I haul it out every so often to use a scanner, and sometimes I use it w/ VNC or CM4 and the tablet interface when controlling a machine outside if the sun is out).
Follow-up: It’s not different from a remote browser, but the latency has now reduced signicantly, down to “quite usable” level, after I
disabled all “Background Apps”
let Win10 finish its silent updates
Sigh, I guess spending an hour stripping Win10 of half of its “default” features is the price to pay to get decent performance on a low-end PC.
I could, but I need to be able to use Carbide Motion too and I’m too old to spend hours fighting Wine. What I may end up doing however, is having CNCjs run on my headless raspberry pi and use the windows miniPC as the front-end only. Whether that would get me low(er) latencies remains to be seen.
