We have been building lab instruments for many year using regular PC's (both desktop and internal).
This has been a nightmare for the following reasons:
1) IT departments (network admins) want to take over the instrument because it's running "Windows" and often muck it up. 2) PC's go obsolete quickly (like Dells) and we have to requalify them. 3) Many industrial PC's are a bit behind on performance.So we are looking into embedded systems (VxWorks, Embedded XP and Embedded Linux).
The application has to do some modest real time number crunching (previous system was a dual Xeon 2.4 with 1GB Mem) new system is planned to have 50x the throughput but we plan to do some data reduction in some other thridparty DSP boards. New system should be much simpler too. Old system stored data in a database this system will stream it out through a web service.
It's very attractive to use a flash based OS but it concerns me it will be more work to migrate has CPU boards go obsolete. A HDD based one might be more generic.
The system must support 1Gbit Ethernet (but 100Mbit may be a more realistic evironment that it may have to run in).
Also a simple built in 2 line LCD display for machine status would but great. The system must have a http webserver (to manage it) and webservices to stream data out. No KeyBoard, No Mouse, No VGA/DVI display (in production).
These systems look close:
The tiny LCD display on the arcom one above looks cool but again may be an issue as things go obsolete. These instruments easily have a 5 year product life cycle and have to be supported for up to 10 years (which is why Windows has been painful).
I appreciate any recommendations to look into or stay away from.