Good bare-bone or industrial PC to run ROS.
What are good bare-bone PCs to run ROS? I'm looking for something that is capable of running a nice GUI and some basic CV. Ideally, it should also have good RT performance.
I found the fitlet2, which has an Atom CPU, but I'm unsure if this little PC has adequate CV performance for some basic image recognition.
UPDATE: more specific requirements:
- I indeed mean real-time as in soft real-time. No human will come to harm when deadlines are missed, but the performance of the system may degrade. For this system, we use Debian with a PREEMPT RT kernel. Machinekit works as a low-level hardware interface. The most important criteria here is jitter.
- There are quite big differences between CPUs when it comes RT performance. Simple single core CPUs usually have the best RT performance. See https://www.osadl.org/Hardware-overview.qa-farm-hardware.0.html
- The application will run for long time periods.
- The application will not be used in extreme conditions (heat, vibrations).
- As meantioned RAM is cheap these days, so I don't think this will limit the selection.
- For the GUI I need OpenGL support, any modern CPU including integrated graphics should do. However, some graphics card degrade RT performance.
- I don't know the exact CV application yet. However, the CPU/GPU should be capable of doing live image and tag recognition via OpenCV. Since it should be future-application proof, I prefer to choose something that covers most cases or is extensible.
@machinekoder: it might have been informative to provide some context with your question. ROS Answers is more a beginners forum, and we get this sort of question a lot. Many times 'real-time' is used in the sense of "fast enough", so the response by @ahendrix is understandable.