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I want to upgrade some hardware and one of my requirements is to include a panel mounted touch screen PC for the machine control. Such PC's are advertised as just a base unit and one with 4Gb of Ram and an Atom processor costs over £800. If I want something with a more powerful processor there is a huge price hike and they start at £1800 - both options include Windows 10 IOT in the price.
I see there are quite a few single board Windows PC's such as the SEEED Odyssey with Windows 10 Pro [^] costing approx £210 or a Latte Panda with Windows 10 Home[^] at £109. (Amazingly, both of these PC's also include an embedded Arduino with all of its I/O but I don't need this).
On paper either would do the job and I am considering giving them a try and see what the pitfalls are.
I am thinking that as Windows 10 IOT is specific for machine control and Edge devices I should install that instead of the supplied W10 Pro or Home. It has to be Windows OS and sadly the new Raspberry Pi's no longer offer Windows as an OS.
Has anyone been down the route and if so have you any comments on either the hardware or which OS to use?
<edited>
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Raspberry Pi?
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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It has to be Windows as the software already exists and the Pi 4 does not support Windows  as did the Pi 3
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Yeah after I posted I investigated the Oddessy(sp) and it has a lot more to offer than the Pi.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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I have a Pi 4 and running Windows 10 for the past 6 months without any problems. 
To get Windows 10 on there was a lot of work.
Downloading the ISO, up-packing it, removing incompatible parts, etc. 
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Thanks very much  .
It is an issue because it is not officially supported  so I cannot expect a service technician to re-install it if necessary.
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The Micro-SD cards are so cheap, you can have several setups with Windows and the apps you need.
Just make sure you have backups of your data.
Mine has been running for over 6 months, never a crash.
I still have 2 spares.
Just don't expect the same performance as a 'real' PC.
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Is there any reason you can't use a PI3? The PI4 has more horsepower and memory, but unless you specifically need that, a PI3 may work.
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I had considered that but in my mind the Pi3 is on its way to being yesterdays product.
I am surprised to see that some of the systems we put in 25 years ago are still in regular use and spares are still being ordered so I am reluctant to put in something that may be obsolete in the near future. Hence the consideration of a generic PC platform and (rather foolishly maybe) an OS that will have a few years of support 
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If you can use the Pi3B that would work. I set up Windows 10 IoT Core on mine and loaded up a small UWP app on it using the official raspberry pi 7" touchscreen. It worked great. If not, here are the development boards that Microsoft recommends:
Suggested Prototype Boards - Windows IoT | Microsoft Docs[^]
Windows 11 IoT seems to be just enterprise only from what I gathered. I couldn't seem to find a non enterprise version like they did with 10.
From what I remember with my small test app, it had to be a UWP app and I also installed Windows 10 IoT Core Dashboard app on my development machine. Integration and debugging with Visual Studio also worked well.
Edit:
For Windows IoT Enterprise (the newest one) here is the documentation page for hardware:
SoCs and Custom Boards for Windows IoT Enterprise | Microsoft Docs[^]
From there it seems like VIA Technologies provides both x86 and Arm boards: VIA Embedded Boards - Speed Up Your Development Time[^]
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Thanks for tyour comments and links especially the documentation page on the latest hardware (Dated 10/04/2021 for anyone else reading this thread).
Lots of homework to do now.
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Personally, I have yet to find an actual need for them. I mean, yeah you can run a version of Windows on it, but do you really need that?
I've found that I do not. I can get away with most controllers using much cheaper arduino compatible offerings, like an ESP32 including the fancy touch screen.
But I guess it all depends on what you need/want.
At most I'd probably use a Raspberry Pi but although I have one, it's collecting dust for lack of need.
Maybe I'm not the best person to ask, and I know elephanting nothing about what you are doing, but this is just my own experience.
Real programmers use butterflies
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If I was starting from scratch I'd agree with you 
Sadly in an industry dominated by PC's running customised software there is not a lot of options.
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Thanks, an interesting link!
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May I ask why it HAS to be specifically windows?
I used to use Windows capable boards, but there is a minimum x2 price hike compared to other options. Subsequently I have standardized on Raspberry Pi's with a Linux distro that best suite my needs at the time.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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It has to be Windows because the machine control software and its entire infrastructure has already been developed for a Windows environment and we just maintain it under licence. Porting it to Linux is a different project and for a different team, we are not in charge of those rules, we simply build the system and keep the customer satisfied.
Personally I fully agree new developments should be using Linux where appropriate, the modern SBC's pack a punch its going to take a while to shake off Windows but it will happen.
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what IO ports do you need?
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A couple of serial ports, two USB2 ports and Ethernet, (WiFi is not necessary) I intend to use a touch screen for normal operation so a keyboard and mouse will only be plugged in by a service engineer. Currently a discrete PC that goes with the system uses FTDI USB to RS232 converters.
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oh ok, i was gonna say something like a intel compute stick, but would need to usb dongle convert a bunch of things off it.
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It's is a good suggestion though!
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I bought a small windows capable board some time ago. It had linux installed but I put windows 10 IOT on it and got it working but because it had a small disk I had problems with windows update taking up all the disk space all the time. So I gave up on it. I will put linux on it again when I have more time. So my advice to you is that whatever board you get make sure you have a least some gigabytes for windows update 🤭
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Thanks for that!
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