Which hardware from development to production?

1

Hello

My name is Rom and I am using OpenCV to count eggs from my 5000 chickens. I got a fairly powerful computer, with GPU and a logitech webcam and everything goes smoothly and the tests where successful. Now is the time to install in place and the question came:

What hardware should I use for my production unit?

  • full computer? are those NUC and Variants capable? (Celeron/Pentium/Ryzen with GPU)?
  • something like Raspberry Pi?

please help!

Thank you in advance,

Rom

2

It’s a balancing act between competing parameters, as always, and the “right” choice will depend on so many factors that only you can know. If it’s just a one-off installation, I’d probably be optimizing for a path that involves low effort to get your prototype running, so probably a similar PC. If you plan on developing this into a product to sell to the market, many other factors become important - cost, reliability, product support lifetime etc. Maybe it makes sense to port your code to a raspberry pi in that case, but then you have to consider whether it’s powerful enough to do what you are doing, etc.

Probably the biggest factors I would focus on, knowing what I know about your project (which isn’t much), are reliability / suitability for the environment you are operating in, and ease / cost of getting and deploying replacements.

There are so many factors in a decision like this. It would help if you shared some of your goals, concerns, etc.

4

Hello Steve and thank you for your answer.

It is just for my coop, maybe something if I expand with another coop, it is easily doable again.

  1. full computer: it is a very dusty environment, I would need to move the computer far away from the camera. Maybe with one of those network OAK?
  2. I was planning on getting one of those cheap computers, maybe with a ryzen that has GPU on the CPU itself, put some 12 GB of RAM and let it running there, but again, it is not an easy environment for computers… maybe those industrial ones, but then we are talking about loads of money and, pardon my french, money is not like chicken poop =D

Thank you,

Rom