I have been tasked to find a development board with the following requirements:
- The embedded system is supposed to connect to between 1-8 [minimum 1 LCD monitor maximum 8 LCD monitor but keep it one for the simplicity at this stage]
- The data(a JPEG or GIF at this stage but could be a webpage in future) to be shown on the screen is coming from a WCF service running on an external IP address from internet. The choice of Binding on WCF service can be your choice. BasicHttpBinding for instance(security is not an issue at this stage). Bandwidth is not an issue at all. WCF setup on the server is highly flexible which means our service could be SOAP based or REST based or whatever which is more reasonable.
Should we go for an embedded Linux board or Windows CE board? The reason for this question is cost factor as Microsoft boards are more expensive than Linux boards. What would be the cheapest board which I could potentially find to consume a WCF service. Cost is a deciding factor in this project. What are our options? Are there any projects out there doing something similar?
"Microsoft boards are cheaper than Linux boards." What does that mean? Microsoft (nor Linux) make boards. Many boards support both OSes. Windows CE runs as low as $3 for the runtime, which is also pretty cheap as far as BOM cost. Your NRE cost is going to be in development, and I'd say if you're a Linux house go Linux, if you're a Windows house, go CE.
CE is going to consume WCF with you writing way less code, though Mono might bring some parity is you're on Linux in that regard.
Beyond that, it's hard to make judgement on hardware for you. We don't know your processing requirements, or really even any hardware interface requirements. You say you need "one LCD". How so? LVDS? HDMI? VGA? Proprietary cable? All of those options are out there. It could be that the display you pick costs more than the board so a cheap board that requires an expensive display doesn't really help you if overall cost is an issue.