SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
The Challenges of the Harshest Environments are met with the latest Rugged Laptops and Tablets By John Reardon, COTS Journal, Publisher In choosing a rugged tablet or laptop the options can be a bit daunting and can cause costly mistakes. Take your time to choose based on your application needs. The term Rugged amplifies the price in a way that makes a poor decision much more costly than the same mistake in a commercial solution. And conversely, when buying beyond your application’s needs, you may be leaving money on the table with costly features that bring no added value.
Processor selections, memory compliments, I/O, and battery life for the most part will be familiar to you. Choosing the right processor and clock speed will be based on the computational needs of the applications and this follows with memory, I/O, and battery life. There is no need to fixate on battery life, if the environment supports an abundance of power, for example being on a large ship. Having a full-keyboard for many appli-
cations can reflect an unneeded expense that just adds weight. So what makes a Rugged tablet or laptop Rugged? Many things can inherently raise the fault-tolerance of a system. Environments that threaten with moisture or immersion are addressed with the standard referred to as IP67 or Immersion Protection 67. This IEC standard defines that the laptop could be dropped in 1.5
Image 1 - Lean Services Architecture enables military equipment to communicate using equipment provided by multiple vendors, over low bandwidth comms and using relatively slow computers, while remaining compatible with legacy systems. Crown copyright image courtesy of Ministry of Defence. 20
COTS Journal | July 2020
