Raspberry Pi/clone(s) most ruggedizable for OLPC fieldwork?

[Peter Robinson]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Feb 7, 2016 3:22 AM, "Peter Robinson" <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> things like
>> the PINE64 above it has a SoC attached network but not storage.
>
> Both SATA (real TB+ disks) and Ethernet (external Wi-Fi AP antennae) are
> icing-on-the-cake we will both strongly consider.
>
>> As is stands at the moment some of the best cheap devices for server
>> style devices is AllWinner A20 devices (CubieTruck, BananaPi and
>> friends) and i.MX6 devices (Wandboard, CuBox-i and friends)
>
> Hugely helpful.
>
> Key criterion for offline/remote deployments: does this accept 128GB MicroSD
> cards, so 2016's developing world $50-100 "knowledge hotspots" increasingly
> now become very real?  (Aside: 256GB MicroSD cards will be part of this well
> before 2020, apparently beyond the capability of most of these SoC's.)
>
> Peter, does Fedora 24 have a shot to one day run on the "$19" Pine64 Plus?!
> Even if it's ambiguous whether it can truly contain 2GB RAM as advertised,
> Pine64 claims to run up to 70C which is very promising if true.  ($15 Pine64
> contains 512MB, and $19 "Pine64 Plus" contains 1GB RAM.  Their 2GB RAM story
> is very attractive, but may be marketing vaporware for now?)

Yes, I've got one awaiting for me on my return to London. Kernel isn't
upstream, nor is u-boot, I'm not sure how big the patches are, I'm
hoping it'll all be landable in F-24.

> Or...would you recommend other ruggedized platforms to run Fedora, for
> schools/libraries/clinics needing this in place by January 1st 2017?
> (Thankfully size does not matter.  Cubox is very cute, and we will use it if
> it's the most rugged, but physically larger units are also fine too.
> Certainly Fedora remains a priority for now, given schoolserver.org's
> obvious OLPC legacy +)

Basically I'd want a specs set, I'm not sure why you'd want to use a
128Gb SD card over an actual SSD or HDD, the later are a lot more
robust. There's literally 100s of possible devices that would possibly
meet your needs, what would be great is a list of must haves and a
list of nice to haves and from that I could give a list of possible
options.