Aotearoa New Zealand has a strong and growing apple industry but struggles to access workers to complete skilled, seasonal tasks such as thinning. Accurately measuring the crop load for individual apple trees is required for thinning and providing optimal decisions on an individual tree basis. This task is challenging due to the dense foliage obscuring the fruitlets within the tree structure. This paper presents the initial design, implementation, and evaluation details of the vision system for an automatic apple fruitlet thinning robot designed to address the labour shortage. The platform straddles the 3.4 m tall 2D apple canopy structures to create an accurate map of the fruitlets on each tree. We show that this platform can measure the fruitlet load on an apple tree by scanning through both sides of the branch. The requirement of an overarching platform was justified since two-sided scans had a higher counting accuracy of 81.17 % than one-sided scans at 73.7 %. The system was also demonstrated to produce size estimates within 5.9% RMSE of their true size.