Laptop

[friolator]

Just a fyi, the lenovo m93p fits in the palm of your hand, is not very expensive, and has worked well on multiple systems. Good luck whatever you go with.

Thanks. I used a GMTec mini PC on my lathe with Acorn, it's about half the size of the Lenovo M93p and works great. The one I got was about $150 from Amazon and has 3 USB ports, 3 HDMI ports, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. The problem is that the control box I'm working in is very small and with all the cabling associated with the computer and Centroid setup, even one of those wouldn't fit inside along with the motor drivers, power supplies, relay board, DB25 breakout, etc. I tried for about an hour to get a decent layout with paper mockups yesterday and just couldn't make it work.

I wound up going with the MASSO G3 in the end, since it's more compact in the control box, there's no computer requirement and it supports 5 axis, which I may upgrade to in the future. It should run cooler as well, with less stuff in the control box (fewer sources of heat, plus better airflow).

[ShawnM]

I typically mount my 1L PC's to the back side of the electrical cabinet door. There's a lot of real estate there that most people overlook.

[friolator]

Yeah in this case it's going to be installed in a tight space, and I'm trying to keep the electronics internal to the machine (except for keyboard/mouse/monitor). We will run this in an office, and may be milling aluminum on it, with a drip or mist coolant setup, so it will also need to have a wraparound enclosure made from extrusion and plexiglass. That would leave the back of the machine inside a space where there could be a lot of dust, coolant mist, etc. I'd just rather have it all inside the cavity in the back where the electronics are, behind two layers of protection from all that.

[ShawnM]

I edited my post for clarification, I mount the PC inside the "electrical" cabinet with all the other electrical machine components and the controller and drives. If your electrical cabinet is in a place where it will get coolant, shavings or dust in it, it's mounted in the wrong place.

[friolator]

The machine I'm retrofitting is small. It was originally sold for milling jewelers wax, and is based on a German Isel mill, but wrapped in Gemvision's steel enclosure. The back has two spaces: one is the area behind the main steel bezel that wraps around the base mill. Then inside that is a tall, narrow aluminum enclosure that houses the electronics. In their design, that inner aluminum box held the power (transformer so you could use it on 110 or 220), the stepper drivers and the control electronics. The VFD is mounted outside this inner box in the main enclosure. Nothing can get inside the electronics box (dust/coolant), because it's immediately behind the Z column of the mill, has some structural elements that wrap around it, and has a cover. Anything that's inside the main box could potentially get coolant on it, if it's at the bottom of the box (I know this because I've spent weeks cleaning wax that had been dissolved by coolant from the entire machine and that let me see where the potential leak points are).

This isn't a typical electrical cabinet, it's custom fitted for this machine and I'm trying to work within those parameters to keep things self-contained. It'll work with a MASSO, but I couldn't get a satisfactory layout with Centroid even though I tried!