On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 07:04:25AM -0700, Warren Kumari wrote:
Michel's Banana Pi BPI-R3 suggestion seems intriguing — yes, it still suffers from the "Now I have another "machine" to manage and patch, and people will try and install iperf / a Quake server / nmap / ruby / 17 different flavors of Emacs on it", but: 1: Perhaps I can mitigate that by making much of the filesystem read-only and 2: it's a great excuse to buy another toy!
Another option would be a RaPi Compute Module 4 with eMMC onboard. (ie. the non-Lite version does not need a SDCard) They have breakout boards for the Compute Module that have spots for 5G WAN. https://thepihut.com/products/compute-module-4-industrial-iot-base-board PiKVM does make the file system read-only, that you have to temporarily disable to do updates, config changes, etc). Potentially, you could copy what they do there.
I also like Jared and Andrew's freetserv / https://lathama.net/Tech/Hardware/USB-32COM-RM option. I might see about building a bunch of the freetserv boards and connecting them to a Banana Pi…. although, more realistically, I'll likely buy a few Banana Pi's, and add them to the ever expanding pile of backlog projects…
One suggestion for freetserv boards I have would be to get a board printer like https://jlcpcb.com to also do the assembly of the surface mount components. Last time I checked, they only did one side, Not both sides.. Have them do the complex side. Pricing was very reasonable. The back non-complex side wasn't that bad overall.