I'm involved in in 2016.
One issue we had at 2015's event is that almost no-one had access to a machine well-suited to the workshops. Even the University's lab machines were running Windows and needed a lot of basic installation.
To shortcut the hours we spent installing (and troubleshooting) software, I'm trying to work out if we could afford to put together a conference workshop machine, or rather something like 50 of them, built around a Pi Zero:
- Pi Zero
- 8GB SD card
- VGA adaptor (VGA displays will be readily available)
- USB hub for keyboard, mouse and network adaptor
- USB-Ethernet adaptor
- pre-installed software (Git, Mercurial, Pillow, virtualenv, all Python/C dependencies, etc)
Does anyone know whether a powered USB hub would be required for all those devices? How trouble-free are VGA adaptors?
Any experiences writing 50 SD cards with an updated image?
If we can do with unpowered hubs, that much better.
PSUs will be sourced locally, for the Namibian mains sockets.
At the end of the conference we can leave the Pis in the hands of the many students who will be there. All the students who actually owned computers had ancient Windows XP (or older) laptops that were far from ideal for what we were doing in the workshops.