Public release of Windows 10 IoT Core is announced
for Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnow board Max recently. It supported UVC stack and media
foundation class in the release. As I am working on a company (e-con systems) which is expert
in design and manufacture the industrial camera modules, I would like to
evaluate Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2 with few of our USB cameras
modules.
As you know Microsoft introduced the Universal Windows Platform(UWP)
from Windows 10, Which means application developed using UWP can run on Windows
10 PC, mobile and IOT core devices. So I searched for camera sample
applications for windows 10 and found the following list of sample UWP applications
for camera from the Github.
I am able to build and deploy successfully all these
application on Raspberry Pi 2. Now I realised the advantage of UWP applications
and the one core windows 10. The Earlier Windows Embedded Compact OS are unique
versions which are not common to other versions of Windows. You can find the
similarity of the OS features but not exactly the same and it should be subset
of the PC windows OS. You have to port the PC application to Windows Embedded
Compact OS and it is not a simple build like the UWP applications.
Unfortunately due to the performance bottleneck of Raspberry
Pi 2 USB 2.0 port and unavailability of DirectX drivers, preview frame rate is
dropped down and just got 5 to 10 FPS even in lower resolutions such as 640x480.
But actually the USB camera module is capable of sending 30 fps in this
resolution. Hope we can get a better performance on Minnow board Max but I don’t
have it to test it.