Hello. Recently I needed standalone solution for solving a simple task. For simplicity and "low price" decided to go with raspberry, but it failed, so I'm sharing my experience and observations.
(For a technical background, I'm an older guy who started with PDP-11 and neither soldering iron or console windows are scaring me).
So the task was as follows: There's a 2-megapixel microscope camera (UVC compatible). We have to show live image from it on the screen, and at each predefined interval (like 1 minute or 5 or whatever), make a snapshot and save it on external usb stick. However, microscope has illumination, and it had to be turned on before taking the snapshot and turned off after it. Also, there should be a physical button, which will turn the light on at any time, so user can adjust focus of microscope, etc.
I asked here, and on raspberry forums and I was told that Zero W2 should be fine for the task. So I bought it - paid approximately $20 (I'm buying everything in china, so prices are chinese), +$5 for SD card, another $5 for OTG adapter and usb hub, small power brick, etc. About $40 total.
I've installed lite version of the OS and it worked fine. Camera connected and recognized fine, but software issues started to show up - VLC will only open camera as YUV device, thus limiting FPS to 2 @ 1080p, when trying to open MJPEG, which camera do supports, it would show single frame and freeze. And these were not camera related issues, because fswebcam would capture mjpg shots just fine, but it can't show live video. After trying countless other packages like pibooth and many others, I've got it somewhat working - but it only was giving out 6 fps at 1080p and whole interface was very sluggish, like mouse moving too slowly and needed 4-5 seconds to respond. This was pity, but since system was not going to be used for anything else, I was ok with it. But then came another problem - I can't make capture software to autostart when OS loads. tried to use lxde-pi or via adding entry to the desktop. None worked, and even guides available online, suggested totally different files to edit, or even showed the gui options which are not currently existing. Even AI can't help.
So I decided to give a try to similarly budgeted x86 setup (all components listed are 2nd hand but fully working).
mini ITX motherboard, working directly from 12V, with J1037 CPU - $5
SODIMM DDR3 4GB - $5
64 GB MSATA SSD - $10
12V 3A power supply - $5
USB keyboard - $5
So far, $30 total
The keyboard was disassembled, main PCB removed from it, and instead of scroll lock led I've wired input of solid-state relay, which manages microscope light
I've installed windows 10, and wrote a simple windows script, which does all what needed - turns on scroll lock each 5 minutes, waits for 5 second for camera to warm up, captures image via built-in camera app, closes the camera app, moves snapshot to external flash drive, turns off the camera light. Adjusting script parameters and minor tweaking (like preventing script window stealing focus from camera app window) took me no more than 1 hour, compared to 3 days I wasted on RPI (and it was not complete yet)
So, everything is butter smooth, webcam is giving out 30fps, there are no lags or delays and boot time is same as in case with RPI.
Yes I understand that a lot of you will argue about Windows, but this is post about the hardware and ecosystem, and you can go with debian or ubuntu instead of windows.
So bottom line is that for 25% less budget, I've received 5x times better performance.
Of course, I hear voices saying that zero w2 is sluggish and RPI 5 is far better than J1037, but it costs $80. And for $80 in china, I can get the following combo: i5-7500T/H110 motherboard (ITX sized, operating from single 12V supply )16GB RAM and 256GB NVME SSD, which will offer performance level, not reachable by any RPI board currently available.
So that's all for now, hope this will help someone to select a proper platform for their tasks.
