Recently one of my friends won a permit to raft down the Grand Canyon for 21 days, I’m going along rowing one of the boats.
I want to find a cheap little laptop, that is at least semi waterproof / rugged so I can put Linux on it and get data from some of the sensors im bringing (spectrometer, ph, etc), plus do a little programming in the evenings.
It really doesn’t need to be powerful, i would just bring my MacBook but I don’t want to break something expensive.
Secondary objectives are at least reasonable battery life, but not too much of an issue with the solar and batteries we’re bringing.
My general recommendation would be to just get you a secondhand thinkpad and a padded sleeve to store it in, but that doesn’t come with any water resistance.
Rugged laptops are a bit of a niche product, you’ll probably need to pay a small premium for the feature set you’re looking for.
They are pretty dang cheap, and could but in dry box, this might be the most reasonable solution— though the AC power requirement is a slight drag over usbc
Regardless of what you purchase, you can absolutely power/charge a barrel jack laptop via DC. Find a spare jack that fits, or sacrifice the stock unit, and wire it into a dcdc converter.