Hi Tom,

I bought this self contained little mother board with
processor for $89 called EPIA mini ITX Mainboard.
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/embedded/ProductSeries.jsp?serialNo=2

There was some question whether Ubuntu Linux would run on this
cheap 17 Cm by 17 Cm mother board. The good news is yes Ubuntu 9.04
(Cost me $16 for the DVD and the magazine.) works fine as does
Windows XP pro. For some strange reason Fedora 5 does not like
the built in video driver.

If I had to buy a new  mother board for a  Hass or Fadal used
NC mill it would cost thousands and then would have only one tenth
of the memory.

Here are the specs on the board.
See any show stoppers?


CPU
    . VIA C3 / EDEN EBGA Processor (on board)
    . Enhanced Ball Grid Array Package (EBGA)
    . Internal L1 128KB and L2 64KB cache memory
Chipset
    . VIA CLE266 North Bridge
    . VT8235 South Bridge
Graphics
    . Integrated UniChrome graphics with MPEG-2 accelerator
Audio
    . VT1616 six channel AC'97 Codec
    . 3 Audio jacks: Line-in, Line-out and Mic-in; switched to 6-channel
      output during 6-channel operations with Smart 5.1 (See Appendix A)
Main Memory
    . 1 DDR266 DIMM socket
    . Up to 1GB memory size
PCI Bus & IDE
    . 1 PCI slot
    . 2 X UltraDMA 66 / 100 / 133 Connector
LAN
    . VIA VT6103 10 / 100 Base-T Ethernet PHY
USB
    . USB v2.0 / v1.1
Firewire
    . IEEE 1394; VIA VT6307S 2-port Firewire
TV-Out (optional)
    . VIA VT1622 TV-Out Controller
    . Supports 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768 NTSC/PAL TV

Paul

Hi Paul,

Nothing jumps out at me, but the processor speed seems a little low - though
it may only limit block process speeds when you are running a lot of very
small line segments a high feedrates.
I would order the 5i20 pci board from Mesa, then plug it into your pci slot,
fire up Linux/Emc2 ver2.3 or higher, then start up EMC2 specifying the Mesa
5i20 driver & Axis interface and see if you get to the machine interface
screen without any errors. That way you'll know that the Emc2 motion engine
is talking to the Mesa card. Next step (your existing servo amps take a +/-
10v reference signal) would be to get and connect the Mesa 7i30 - and a
servo and encoder (on a bench) and begin tuning the servo loop.


Here are a few links that address EMC2/motherboard issues:

http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Hardware_Requirements

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.emc.user/11971/focus=11974

I have made proofs for the slide and spacer and they look very good. I had
to order some end mills to finish cutting the spacers. I am going to size
the slide material to exactly 2.500" wide in order to get all the blanks
uniform so they will clamp equally tight in the vise when stacked like
pancakes. There is some slight curvature in the material along the width
dimension which makes clamping them on the ends difficult.

So far so good!

Tom


Looking good Tom. A 5i20 is my next purchase.
I ran into some problems with that mother board. Apparently
it is 386 based and a couple of Linux programs refused
to run like xpaint and gftp. I never heard of that before.
Strange.

I am wondering whether I need to buy a more powerful mother
board.

Paul Lamar