This is to be a small vehicle tracking unit with 4G and GPS capabilities.

I though basing it on a Raspberry Pi would give the flexibility to make it into whatever I like…. so I brought a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with 1GB of RAM, which was great.

But then I discovered the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is even more basic, with a single core, 512MB of RAM, wifi, bluetooth, USB, and not a lot else. It’s just powerful enough to run a tracking device, and won’t use a lot of power.

I’ve stayed with the Rasperry Pi OS which is basically Debian Linux with some built in components to make it work perfectly with the Raspberry Pi hardware.

For an application such as this, a desktop environment is not only unnecessary, but would be painful to use on such a low powered device. So I based it off the Lite image or the Raspberry Pi OS.

It’s basically Debian Linux without a GUI, which I’ve been using on my servers for years.