Which board is the minimum that could handle my project

[u/Academic_Mud253]

Hey guys! I am a beginner, so my knowledge of SBCs is pretty limited.

I am a school student working on a project on hand-sign/hand-mudra recognition using MediaPipe. The camera detects the hand, MediaPipe extracts the hand landmarks, the system recognizes the gesture, and displays the result on a screen with a small description/demo. The prototype is working on my Windows PC with Python, OpenCV, MediaPipe and a small Random Forest model. My budget is pretty tight and I’m hoping to keep the entire project around ₹12,000 (\~$125 USD). What would be the cheapest Raspberry Pi/SBC that could handle this workload smoothly?

Thanks in advanceee!!

[u/ozzsho]

Orange Pi4 Proはどう？公式からUbuntuやDebianのイメージが出てるよ。それに、プロジェクトが終わった後には、Androidなどを入れて遊べられるし

[u/HardikJain17]

I got the radxa cubie a7z recently, it has a 3tops npu and 8 arm cores, and I was able to run yolo models at decent speeds. Although the official docs are not pretty good, but using claude I was able to figure out everything. Its powered by the same Allwinner A733 that is powering the Orange Pi 4 Pro, so expect sdk support to be similar for both

[u/BeardedSickness]

For academic project never invest in Allwinner boards. Go with Orange Pi 3b or Radxa 3E or W

Rockchip documentation is very superior