What Windows platform are you using for Cortex?

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Thanks Karam - I just couldn't see for looking! It's obvious now you've shown it me! Doh!

Am getting it setup (so I'll need to transfer my licence at some point!) .. but doing some windows updates, seems to have it stuck in a loop of trying to update. Hopefully will have more time to look at it over the weekend as been super busy work wise of late.

I took a similar route a few months ago -- getting a small sized no-name Chinese box from Aliexpress. Fanless N5105. 5 Ethernet ports. Got it w/o RAM and put in 16Gb bought elsewhere.
I've put Proxmox on it and then Cortex in a Windows 10 Pro vm with 4Gb ram and 2 CPU cores. CPU never goes above 30% but then my Idratek install is quite small and doesn't do any video type stuff.

The spec of the host is WAY more than Cortex needed but promox is also hosting 2 x pfSense, and a docker host for assorted stuff (MQTT, Node-Red amongst) and plans to move more on there too. (project "use/pay for less electricity"). https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005...a5581802uPz6gw

The box runs "quite warm" but it seems stable and cortex seems quite happy).

One perhaps interesting thing - My idranet doesn't (currently) go anywhere near where the box is, so have used VirtualHere to do USB-over-Ethernet from a RaPi where my PCU-001 is, to a client on the Win10 install. Doubtless not a "supported configuration" (so don't tell Karam) but it seems to be running as good as the PCU going direct into a USB socked on the host. Not free, but was very easy/quick to do!

USB - Inspired idea if it works ok :-). Since USB is already at an arms length from Cortex as compared to the tighter interaction with the UART in the earlier RS232 days, then probably not so problematic from a communications point of view. Not sure if there might be other potential issues such as recovery from hiccups, eg. due to PCU power cycling or other reasons for USB disconnection/reconnection. Probably worth testing a few scenarios if you haven't already. Obviously more links in the chain equals more potential possibilities for problems so I guess its down to the reliability of each link. I felt a bit like that when we had to move to USB, but aside from some rare issues on specific user platforms it's been generally fine over many years now.

BTW another theoretical possibiity which someone asked me about a little while ago is Cortex IOTA to WiFi gateway. However for reasons I won't try to get into here (already heading off topic..) it isn't presently possible between Cortex and what we consider to be the 'main IDRANet' (containing a PCU and modules with IDs in the range 0000-2FFF). Might be able to have an option to remove this restriction if popular, though again I'd probably feel uneasy to put all my eggs through a single WiFi link for the main network.

These computing boxes that you found look like they could offer a really good value fanless solution for higher powered configurations (eg. video intensive). Certainly appear to have a much faster processor in the N5105 as compared to the N2830 (which I'm currently using on the XCY boxes). Possibly the N2830 box will consume less power but, without measuring, difficult to say what the differences would actually be when they are both idling on similar tasks. I've been running an XCY unit on my own home system for the last few months just to see how well it copes and if any issues show up. I have a couple of cameras on it but I'm not doing anything fancy with them or operating at high frame rates so doesn't really tax it. So far so good... Anyway it's great to see more options for these fanless boxes.

our MiniITX failed, and a while later we blew up our Zoostorm PC, and for a year or so now we run Cortex W10 on a MS Surface Laptop Go2 running Windows 11 ...

no keyboard backlight - never imagined anyone would do that !

we have some NightNight logic - push a button when go to bed, Cortex checks windows doors, scenes, lights, whatever, disables as appropriate plus selected lights so when walk about in the night & don't wake people - which took to stalling the computer if per chance it's screen was dark & the PC hadn't been Restarted for several weeks. What, go figure ! Tried several things, the one that worked was to change the setting so the screen goes dark after three hours rather than the twenty or thirty minutes it was set to. Madness ... assumed was a bug, but MS updates have not fixed it !

Chris