|
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I looked at that panel, it's pretty big so I imagine you get a
| good amount of power from it. I tried to make a basic ESP01
| powered by two 5V 100mA solar cells in parallel, using capacitors
| as batteries and it could not overcome the step down regulator's
| startup current pull (unless I built up charge in the caps and
| shorted it to get it started). I have since acquired super
| capacitors I think I will try it again.
|
| ESP01 modded has deep sleep capability so it would wake up, send
| an http request out, and then go back to sleep.
| snek_case wrote:
| If you want more power, there's a lot of all-in-one lithium ion
| batteries with inverter nowadays. These also have a built-in
| solar charge controller. You can pair it with a 20W, 30W or
| 100W solar panel, and this can all be found on amazon. Theres
| also USB outputs and 12V outputs typically, if you want to be
| more energy-efficient.
|
| Example: https://www.rocksolars.com/products/rocksolar-
| weekender-port...
|
| Should be enough to power a small router and a full Raspberry
| Pi 4 for a day, or a more minimalistic setup for several days.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Yeah you can go hardcore. I remember seeing someone make a
| toolbox server that they put on a roof, it might have been
| posted here actually.
|
| I was just looking at small things like those garden night
| lights you can stake into the ground, has a solar cell on it.
| snek_case wrote:
| If you can make a garden light server that will survive the
| HN front page, you win at HN :)
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Yeah that would be something. The constant RF power alone
| hmm would be a good challenge.
| codazoda wrote:
| I also have an outdoor solar light that I'm not using and a
| raspberry pi zero. I dunno how solar controllers work or
| what a small one might require. I also wonder if I could
| run this off of 4 or 8 AA rechargeable batteries and then
| just feed the solar panel into those. If it worked, they
| may not work long due to charge/discharge without a proper
| controller, but maybe that's okay with replaceable
| batteries. I have no idea if it could start this simple.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Just rattling thoughts off the top of my head, my advice
| would be to go to a forum like allaboutcircuits.com and
| look around/ask. Actually could probably get help on a
| forum like RaspberryPi/askelectronics on reddit.
|
| Probably not going to work honestly about the outdoor
| light (need more solar cells). The voltage charging the
| battery has to be higher than the voltage of the battery.
| Also have to look at the current being drawn by each
| piece, when the radio goes on that causes a surge in
| current draw too. For the Pi Zero (non-W) something like
| 5V * 70-200mA say current so up to 1W needed * duration.
| The batteries could do that but the solar cell can't keep
| it topped off. Also yeah you need the charge controller,
| some diode to make sure voltage doesn't go back to the
| solar cells from the batteries... lead acid battery is
| "safer" to work with but BMS chips for lipos are pretty
| inexpensive. Need a voltage regulator to take your
| batteries and drop it down/keep it at 5V to keep the Pi
| happy.
|
| There's probably way easier approaches to do this with
| regard to pre-made parts but yeah. I guess depends how
| much you want to learn/do yourself. I remember the first
| time I soldered a 2x16 LCD display there were micro
| shorts and it was smoking.
|
| What I like about the capacitor idea and something low
| power like an ESP01 is it just accepts what the solar
| cells put in and that's it of course I still use a
| voltage regulator to put 3.3V to the ESP. Doesn't last as
| long as a battery but it's not as complex.
|
| Anyway this guy made a solar-powered rc plane/charging it
| in midair pretty cool.
|
| https://youtu.be/1OGrDvInUAY?t=701
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I like the idea of websites which _aren 't_ constantly
| available. Websites which have to sleep too._
|
| I'm with you. It reminds people that the internet is made up in
| people, not robots.
|
| Being a little more human hasn't hurt B&H Photo, whose web site
| doesn't take orders on the sabbath.
| divbzero wrote:
| With solar powered servers like this, I wonder if plain HTTP
| could make more sense than HTTPS. With a long cache expiration,
| the website could be served by public HTTP caches even when the
| origin server is asleep.
| lowercasename wrote:
| That's a really interesting point and one I hadn't considered!
| I'm reverse proxying it through a larger server on the home
| network which is public-facing, and that server automatically
| slaps HTTPS on whatever it sends out.
| jart wrote:
| I've been hugging Hacker News to death the past few hours waiting
| for Solar Witch to come back online. Something like this is the
| reason why I come to the website so I hope if there's not enough
| hours left of daylight, where OP lives, that the mods can at
| least give him or her a redo.
| farmerstan wrote:
| I wonder what the most powerful server you could create given
| reliable solar power like in the Bay Area.
| Klasiaster wrote:
| The real obstacle I see for these kind of projects is exposing
| them to the Internet. Standard wifi routers are horrible even
| with UPNP... The promise of having a globally reachable IPv6
| address is also destroyed by the complexity/inability to have the
| wifi router forward something like port 80 traffic.
| [deleted]
| petercooper wrote:
| I've been thinking about doing a similar project and was going
| to have it tunnel through another server with frp or rathole
| which would make it very easy to expose to the Internet and
| also cut off a whole family of vulnerabilities. Now I wonder if
| that would be considered 'cheating' :-)
| elwell wrote:
| I wonder how Solar Witch feels about the possible permanence of
| daylight savings time.
| duxup wrote:
| > I like the idea of websites which _aren't_ constantly
| available. Websites which have to sleep too.
|
| The local state unemployment office website will only let you
| complete some tasks during business hours.
|
| When you're unemployed it is a lot less amusing.
| spzb wrote:
| It's a cute idea and one to add to my list of things to make and
| do
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Solar energy is too unpredictable and can't serve as a reliable
| source of power. We should be thinking about servers running on
| nuclear power.
| debesyla wrote:
| You got me thinking... Are there any ways for a simple person
| to make it's own nuclear power reactor? You know, wind and
| solar is just "buy from internets and plug in", mostly, but
| what about nuclear? Would it even be legal? :-D
| politelemon wrote:
| Maybe we could stuff thousands of bananas in a box.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Probably not. This toy was the closest thing I think a
| layperson can get their hands on https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_La...
| jcun4128 wrote:
| This guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Completely missed the point.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| What's the point? The page isn't loading anymore btw
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Don't you want a server powered by a portable nuclear
| reactor? Are you even an IT person?!
| saeranv wrote:
| Very cool project. I'm really intrigued by this idea of having
| websites reflecting geographic location, and even local weather
| conditions (with some lag). What's the peak and average power
| (energy/second) you get from your solar panel, and what's the
| power consumption of your server? Also what's the physical size
| of your solar panels?
|
| My guess is that the server might use around the same power as a
| laptop (~50 W). Assuming a square meter patch of earth gets
| around 100 W (dependent on latitude/time of day), and assuming
| something like a 10% efficiency that works out to around 80 W (on
| average during sunlight hours)? So you're maybe getting 8 hours
| of server power per day from 10 hours of sunlight? Is that a
| reasonable ballpark estimate?
| sgt wrote:
| Slap a caching loadbalancer in front of this puppy and you'll
| have complete scalability and uptime. /s
| [deleted]
| shagie wrote:
| A similarly inspired project - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
| (and the power data -
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html )
| sidpatil wrote:
| OP mentions this project as a direct inspiration.
| [deleted]
| halfdaft wrote:
| lovely project, excellent name. I have a major soft spot for tiny
| tech projects with personality, thanks!
| bubba_sparks wrote:
| I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots
| finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt
| and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if
| you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night
| scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their
| solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online.
| Progress marches forward one baby step at a time. Congrats
| dearest Solar Witch engineer, you have sealed all our doom. When
| the historians look back at when it all started...it started
| right here.
| daenz wrote:
| We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it
| was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent
| on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to
| survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
| darkwater wrote:
| In you future I can see humanity living always during winter
| near a pole, and slowly migrating during nights from one to
| another when spring starts.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lessname wrote:
| Then humans try to darken the sky, which results in robots
| using humans as a source of power. Sounds familiar.
| bubba_sparks wrote:
| Another one of my ideas stolen. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| akeck wrote:
| Are dithered images better for power consumption? I see them on a
| lot of solar-powered pages. I did some experiments in GIMP and
| couldn't make a dithered image much smaller than a heavily
| compressed grayscale that looked a lot better.
| lowercasename wrote:
| Not as far as I can tell! Absolutely ashamed to say I did it
| because it looked cool. I did manage to get the dithered GIF
| down to 7KB, but I think I could have done the same with a
| limited palette and no dithering.
| akeck wrote:
| They do have wonderful look. Reminds me of the mid 1990s web.
| Edit: Btw, I love solar-powered projects. Thanks so much for
| sharing!
| lowercasename wrote:
| There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly,
| that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug
| somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently
| offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like:
| https://ttm.sh/ix3.png
| smoe wrote:
| I'm actually quite surprised and impressed that I was able to
| open the site and leave a message while this is on the
| frontpage!
| lowercasename wrote:
| I've been resetting it every 2 minutes! This is how regular
| servers work, right?
| Aachen wrote:
| HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but
| it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high
| on the front page and the page specifically recommended
| reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is
| hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection.
| The load average didn't budge.
|
| People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need
| when you "go viral", presumably because more people read HN
| than post on HN so most will just never have tried, and even
| fewer people try without some preparation (you don't know for
| sure that it was unnecessary if nothing went wrong).
|
| If one's pages don't require a lot of (pre)computation and
| you're not a huge destination on the web, things like load
| balancers, server clusters, etc. are a waste of time and money.
| But _not_ using fancy tech is not what people here like to geek
| out on so...
| floren wrote:
| Yeah my personal site is hosted on a very small VPS instance,
| has gone to the front of HN twice, and never really blinked.
| lowercasename wrote:
| Well, granted, no doubt, but my poor little server routinely
| crashes after a few dozen connections, and exposing it to HN
| was the first time it experienced that many. Something is
| clearly amiss!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Sure, but - and I say this with considerable respect
| because it in no way detracts from the impressiveness of
| the work - that's clearly a bug, and I would hope most
| production web servers don't fall over quite that easily.
| Aachen wrote:
| Sure, I didn't mean to dismiss that it's a good test for
| custom software on embedded hardware :). More of a general
| remark that it seems most people's perception is that HN
| does some good "hugging" and that I think this is a
| misconception - unless, of course, you run ultra low power.
| Kudos for doing exactly that!
| lowercasename wrote:
| You're right - this was my impression too! You read a few
| dramatic posts about being hugged and you get this idea
| that HN is a behemoth that DDoSes everything it loves.
| Thanks for the context!
| jart wrote:
| Are you doing SSL on that Solar Arduino? Try using only the
| ciphersuite RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA256 with a 1024 bit RSA key.
| jart wrote:
| That's because people are so accustomed to leveraging
| mountains of free candy that they've forgotten that a web
| page can be served with less than 1000ms of cpu time. I got a
| job once when I told a story about a web app I wrote was
| going viral getting a million visitors a day while I was
| strolling in the park. The web servers I write only need a
| single system call (writev) to serve gzip encoded assets so
| wrk says they can do a million requests per second on one pc.
| So it's not like it was any kind of big technical achievement
| even though it was a technical job. My point is that we're
| drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master
| class engineer all it takes is not using it.
| ge96 wrote:
| Really cool, I like hardware that uses power like this
|
| Also with something like this if it's using say a cellular or sat
| network you could drop it in the wilderness somewhere, a node
| that is hard to take down. Maybe some kind of Lorawan is more
| realistic but yeah something working remote/not on standard
| network provider. (but somehow is visible by http? hmm)
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Lorawan would not provide a very pleasant user experience.
| ge96 wrote:
| What is it like a "dropped packets" deal? This is not my
| field at all. I just hear about it a lot regarding low
| power/far range.
| detaro wrote:
| It's slow and shared spectrum. Even if you max out your
| legal duty cycle (which increases the risk you get
| interference from others, and interfere with others) and
| have perfect conditions, you get <50kbyte per hour.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Cool idea!
|
| This begs the question if we could do the same with data centers:
| put them into hibernation during the night and move load to the
| sunny sites. Sure, latency would be higher, but it won't affect
| that many night-active people. Perhaps it's worth it to remove
| one use-case of energy storage?
|
| (Yeah, the whole de-globalization and no-data-outside-my-backyard
| government movements speaks against this. Maybe there's some way
| around that.)
| youngtaff wrote:
| As far as I can recall Yahoo started shifting whole loads
| between data centers for energy and resilience needs 10ish
| years ago
|
| Think this talk from Mike Christian covers it
| https://youtu.be/iO2z3ttlpi4
| Kalium wrote:
| That's a fascinating idea! So let's dig in a bit.
|
| A lot of places experience the procession of the equinoxes. You
| wind up with the sun coming up after typical daytime working
| hours start and often setting after they end for part of the
| year. In places like Finland, this can mean a six-hour day in
| December. Some people may be different, but many expect things
| like Netflix and other entertainment options to work well in
| the evening. The details of solar power mean that less than
| 100% of daylight hours are useful for generation.
|
| Further, the decreased usage of local data centers would have
| to be balanced against increased long-distance bandwidth usage
| and the corresponding increase in data center usage elsewhere.
| You would need to over-provision quite a few places relative to
| local demand to keep up their part in this follow-the-sun.
|
| Let there be no doubt that your idea is interesting. It might
| not result in any desirable outcomes, though. Naively, it seems
| like it could get pretty expensive to turn one data center into
| four or five (with attendant solar farms) with a bunch of
| intercontinental high-bandwidth links to avoid having to store
| energy. It might work for some workloads, but seems sub-optimal
| for general-purpose use.
|
| A more detailed financial analysis is of course possible and
| perhaps worth exploring! Adding wind, hydroelectric,
| geothermal, and nuclear power would make the whole thing far
| more workable. Or just use local energy prices.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Hi! Please excuse me for being the "a stranger was wrong on
| the internet >:(" guy, but the precession of the equinoxes is
| an incredibly cool concept that I've been learning a lot
| about lately, and it's not quite what you're describing, but
| rather the slow rotation of the earth's axis over a period of
| about 26,000 years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession
|
| Just thought I'd share because astronomy is cool!
| [deleted]
| gundmc wrote:
| This is kinda what Google announced they're trying to do - move
| around workloads to run in data centers where Green energy is
| available depending on weather conditions and time of day so
| that all workloads 24/7 are run by green energy (instead of
| just buying offsets).
|
| Edit: Better link:
| https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/247-carbon-fr...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I agree that trying every possible thing to make datacenters
| use less power but when you go into smaller and smaller process
| nodes it also makes it more efficient ? That and figuring out
| efficient coping strategies ?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Seems empty.
| samstave wrote:
| this would be really cool along national hiking trails to hold
| data abut a spot, or have a guest login, or a trail-head/trail-
| check-point type logging system, say along the appalachian trail
| where hikers register/leave notes etc at each check point.
|
| these should be placed all over and come up with a good app to
| manage such.
|
| these was that cheap card here a while back which had cell
| coverage for like 5 years and could send out some limited data
| per month...
|
| that would be perfect marriage... typing with popcicle sorry for
| formatting
| codazoda wrote:
| I have a raspberry pi zero that I'd kinda like to setup as a
| Wi-Fi hotspot like this. You could only use it if you were in
| range. Kind of a Wi-Fi geo cache.
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