Small devices used in our day life are constructed with powerful architectures that can be used for industrial applications when requiring portability and communication facilities. We present in this paper an example of the use of an embedded system, the Zeus epic 520 single board computer, for defect detection in textiles using image processing. We implement the Haar wavelet transform using the embedded visual C++ 4.0 compiler for Windows CE 5. The algorithm was tested for defect detection using images of fabrics with five types of defects. An average of 95% in terms of correct defect detection was obtained, achieving a similar performance than using processors with float point arithmetic calculations.