XCarve Remotely

I’ve never liked the idea of parking my Macbook out in the shop with my xcarve so right from the start I tried using a Raspberry pi. This worked great – if I wasn’t using Easel. I’ve used various configurations of Raspberry PI 3, Then the 4 That worked OK but I had some issues as I still needed to hack the Easel Driver.

Then I discovered the Atomic PI. $30!! (That’s less than a Raspberry PI 4) Its larger than a Raspbery PI, but small enough to sit on the top of the XControler. Has a built in SD Card, and comes preinstalled with Lubuntu. Best of all it’s an X86 processor so it runs the Linux Easel driver natively. The only thing I had to do was make sure the Wifi card turns on at boot by making sure the network manager is enabled for all users. Then I installed XRDP – with is a linux version of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop. Now I can design on my mac using Fusion 360, import it into easel from my mac. Now once I have the project created in Easel… I can connect to the Atomic pi – and I can use any device with an RDP client such as a tablet, phone. Using a tablet connected via RDP I can take it out and setup my Easel project. Jog the machine, set up the touch plate, and start the carve, and then leave. If my XRDP Session disconnects it stays running and I can just reconnect to it.

I am not affiliated in any way with the Atomic PI – I make nothing just thought it was a good product and allows me to NOT have my expensive desktop, and run it off a small single board computer.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N298F2B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

1 Like