I’ve seen people mention accidentally hitting the RTC Reset button near the power input jack and not being able to boot from the onboard EMMC after that. I also noticed that the thing had booted with the BIOS saying it can’t find the system disk but waiting about a minute it then boots perfectly well.
I will have to dork with the GPIO to see what else can be done besides using it like a standard computer. ie like driving servo motors and accessing external sensors.
And since it has an older version of Ubuntu on it and a new LTS version has been released, the archive URL needs to be adjusted to get updates to bring it to 18.04.5.
Basically, edit /etc/apt/source.list and change “archive…” to “us.archive…”
I was quite surprised to see that WiFi still worked without an external antenna. It was a weak signal but enough to get a network and do the updates just fine.
I’d me more than happy to try an ARM version on any of my Pi’s (I’ve lost count on how many I have, >50).
Here’s a SBC that looks promising. The Hackboard 2.
Unfortunately the price of a good used laptop is around $100. Unless you have a monitor, keyboard and mouse laying around, you will be in at the $100 price point when purchasing a bare bones SBC.
Hackerboard 2 is not even in the ball park of a $40 computer. They’ve priced it at $140 with Windows and only for a short time will sell it for $99 with a different, free, OS. $40 just for Windows and 3x the cost of the $40 Atomic Pi? Sorry but just so tired of marketing dweebs claiming Raspberry Pi competitor, etc, etc only to see 3x and more the cost. Look at the comparison chart, they picked an 8GB rPi4 to compare it to instead of the 4GB($55) or even 2GB($40) rPi4.
If you really want Microsoft Windows then get a used laptop. But be aware, if you use Linux you can boot the OS off a USB thumb drive and not even need a hard disk in the computer. I mention that because many used laptops will come without the hard disk due to corporate policy of shreading them.
So I found this thread and figured I would update with my experience.
I am currently running a atomicPi with windows. Why windows I wantes RDP (remote desktop) windows RDP seems to work the best for this situation. I create a shared drive then just save the processed image to it then run lightburn from the atomicPi. As of today I have been sending large jobs to it with no issues. It is running as good as any desktop once I turned off page file.
I am next going to test the atomicPi with a camera while running a job to see if it can handle it.
So far my setup is just the bare atomicPi no expansion board. Its just the atomicPi, 5v buck converter, and 7 inch screen, powered usb 3.0 hub, Windows 10. K40 with cohesion3d board. So far so good.
Explaining Computers (Atomic Pi Intel Atom SBC - YouTube) does a pretty good review of the Atomic Pi including a pretty complete explanation of the surplus nature of the board at about the 15 minute mark.
As others have mentioned, heck, if you can get one, grab it. It’s obsolete, but, in most cases isn’t that true of practically any technology we buy?
I got mine on order, maybe I’ll buy another now 
I’d originally purchased it over a year ago to use on an automous RC car project which used Tensorflow and wanted more power than the rPi3B+ we were using. Little did I know that TF wasn’t optimized for x86 so it was a pig compared to the rPi3B+ but by then I was so impressed with the performance of Linux(Lubuntu) on it I’d purchased a 2nd one and that one came with wide angle camera. Which works pretty good with LightBurn.
I agree, if you are planning on using many and needed them to be available in a year, 2 or 3 it’s not a good choice. But $40 with EMMC, a camera and all it’s very nice one-off kit.
I’d say if it can run LightBurn for $40 standalone, that makes it a very nice dedicated Laser Controller! I’ll have to work with Rick on the licensing terms for this… 
At one point Oz was going to get one and look at it/try it but I never heard how that went.
My version came with Lubuntu 18.04 preloaded on the EMMC so it was a walk in the park getting LightBurn running on it. It could be a bit much for others installing Linux on the EMMC compared to what they are used to in the Windows world. Feel free to ping me on anything if you hit bumps setting it up.
I have it, but I also have about 15 other things sitting here that are more likely to turn profit, so those take precedence. 
I don’t understand how you have time for the forums AND for coding so I get it. Thanks for the update.
I probably don’t get as much sleep as I need to, and I have a VERY understanding girlfriend.
OMG, and you have a girlfriend! I’m going to start calling you Oz The Magician. LOL
Girlfriend, dog, two birds, and a driveway that occasionally needs snowblowing.
Well, I got my two Atomic Pis today. Hooked one up and had Lightburn running on it within 15 minutes. The only thing I need to figure out (because I’m Linux illerate) is how to access my NAS files (which are SMB shares) from the LightBurn file open dialog.
I need to wait to try it on the K40 as I have a job I need to finish on it first. Probably in a couple of days (if all goes well tomorrow).
They sure are a lot of hardware for a little bit of money! I guess one of the jobs before I swap over the K40 is to cut out an enclosure for this Atomic beast!
Thanks for all your help and advice! I think this baby will address a couple of needs.
Well done and yes, a good amount of capability for little money and with Lubuntu reloaded on EMMC to boot. literally. Lubuntu might not have the GUI setup tools for getting onto your SMB NAS like Ubuntu and Kubuntu but it’s doable.
I was able to connect to the server and access the shared files from the Lubuntu file manager (using Go->Network something something) but I didn’t know how to ‘mount’ this so that LightBurn would be able to ‘see’ the folder from its Open file dialog.
However, I’ve probably only spent five minutes on the ‘investigation’ (at the end of the day), so maybe tomorrow I’ll find the secret.
In the short term, at least, I know that I could copy any relevant file into the Atomic Pi’s filesystem. I’d rather not fill that up, however…
Great discussion. For those wanting to offload the burning to a dedicated computer, here is what I do. I run LB on my main PC and then create/save GCode. On my laser out in the garage, I have RPi3 connected to my GRBL board via USB. On the Pi I run UGS. The nice part is that you can set up SMB sharing on the Pi so in LB you can save GCode directly to the Pi documents folder (or use something like FileZilla). I then use VNC Client on an iPad to log into the Pi in the garage, start UGS and run the job, jog, home, etc. The iPad is my screen, mouse and keyboard for the Pi. I was using an old laptop in the garage w/LB but got tired of having to be in the garage when designing.