A couple of days ago, I broke down and bought a refurbished laptop for the bean sorting project. It surely seems to be a smoking good deal at $243.09 plus tax. I have been working to get the thing running on a Raspberry Pi and that works fine, but is way more hassle than we need during the development stage. It was necessary to hook up a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and the camera which, during the development stage, needs to be moved around a lot. It is just easier to do it on a laptop.
The other really big benefit is that, for the Raspberry Pi, I needed to do my development and testing on my home laptop, commit the code to a repository, switch the camera from the laptop to the Raspberry Pi and rebuild the code on the command on the RPi. That was a hassle. Now I will be able to put the entire development environment on the laptop and send it off to the mechanical designer (Gene). We can get all the lighting and controls developed with a full blown computer, then switch over to whatever cheap embedded computer we pick when everything is working. In the meantime, when I get some new code for Gene to consume, it will be way easier for him to build it and test it out with duplicate systems.