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A website that runs on a solar-powered server in Barcelona
- emiliobumachar 7y agoVery cool project. Will the traffic boost from HN first page throw electricity consumption over an edge?
- manmal 7y agoIt seems to be a static site, so traffic surges should not lead to significant CPU spikes. Maybe the RAM and network controllers pulling a bit more power?
- anyfoo 7y agoThere’s still a Webserver running, serving the site. It might not saturate the CPU before the network is saturated, but I’d still expect a significant spike in CPU usage.
- benj111 7y agoNah, its summertime in the northern hemisphere, plenty of daylight. Wouldn't recommend submitting in the winter though. This does highlight a possible new definition for 'progressive' websites. Websites that add features as more power is available.
- rtkwe 7y agoPreviously on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847
- dx7tnt 7y agoI'm sure this has been posted here multiple times.
- rtkwe 7y agoOh yeah that was just the highest result on Algolia's HN search. It's definitely one of the evergreen sites that gets posted pretty regularly.
- msla 7y agoAnd this website: https://yarchive.net/ https://yarchive.net/ is still more readable.
- rntksi 7y agoPresumably to optimise this website would mean different things? For example would it be better to read from the flash drive or cache things in RAM power-output-wise? I think that's a question we never ask. We would for example consider a memcache versus none for performance reasons but probably never for power output reasons. Very interesting!
- jnty 7y agoHave we not been optimising for power usage for the last ten years at least? It's really important for tablets, phones and laptops.
- kungtotte 7y agoDevices have all made great advances in improving battery life, both by advancing battery technology and by having on the fly adjustments of things like screen brightness. Content providers however haven't really done much. Do you think app and web developers give much thought to battery life when they make their products? If they ever optimize it's for reasons such as responsiveness (which drives customers away if it's poor), and battery life is at best a sideeffect.
- benj111 7y agoNo not really, websites have been using more and more video, images, JavaScript. I'm sure the average website of 10/20 years ago uses less resources, and by extension power than the current average website. I suppose you could argue we do more with each unit of power, I would contend most of that has been wasted on non core frivolities that aren't worth the cost though.
- falcolas 7y agoThe hardware side of things, yes. The software side of things (outside the OS), not so much.
- dahfizz 7y agoI would argue that's way outside the scope of software development. First, you can't really know how various things are implemented in hardware. Something that saves power on one machine will increase power usage on another. This would be a big step backwards in terms of abstraction. Second, and more important IMO, is that it's just not our job. Hardware people should make efficient hardware, and software people should make efficient software. The meaning of efficient depends on the context.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoWould be interesting to see the spec required for doing the same thing, but with 99.9% uptime.
- walrus01 7y agoI have off grid pv powered telecom systems that for the last 18 months have averaged seven nines uptime, but they also cost a lot more than a small home built setup. Typical setup is sixteen 360W 72 cell panels on a ground mount, big Schneider charge controller, lots of battery.
- tombert 7y agoI am wondering that too; I have a bunch of ESP32 chips that even have microSD card support, and that peak out at around 1W of power (I think). It's relatively easy to write an HTTP server for the ESP chips with Arduino or uLisp, and it's also relatively easy to get 10,000 mAh batteries; I wonder if I could get close to 99.9% uptime if I were to jury-rig something like that.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI also wonder which webstack would optimise best for power consumption. I suspect that something like nginx with lua and redis might be a good starting point, but that is only a very rough guess. edit - thinking about it, I am a mile off. Will be something like compiling a custom server and having no OS.
- Cerium 7y agoI worked on a data logger project that required solar power in the mountains. We had to size the batteries for the longest expected run of cloudy days, then size the solar panel to be able to nearly charge the battery bank in one day, since the region we were in had normal weather patterns of 3-5 days cloudy, 1-2 days sunny.
- driverdan 7y agoBattery capacity to carry it through a few days of storms, enough solar to keep it charged on overcast days. I'd say less than $300 worth of hardware.
- bdickason 7y agoGreat idea to show viability of solar setups! I’ve installed a simple solar panel / charge controller / battery solution in a van and was surprised how simple it is to get up and running. The tech is really reliable and is super affordable.
- theNJR 7y agoMind sharing a few details?
- aaronax 7y agoI'll share details of what I installed a few months ago in my 37 foot sailboat. It will be more of a counterpoint to "how simple it is to get up and running." But it enables a great many luxuries in our live-aboard lifestyle. -4x 100 Ah LiFePo4 batteries (BattleBorn brand) -3000 watt charger/inverter unit (Victron MultiPlus) -3x 360 watt solar panels (LG Neon R) -Solar charge controller (Victon SmartSolar) -System controller (Victron ColorControl GX) -Battery monitor (Victron BMV) -A lot of heavy wiring, ranging from 4 gauge to 4/0 gauge. Some segments are designed to handle 400 amps (12V DC, if my system was any larger I would have gone with a 24V or 48V design to keep wire sizes reasonable). Of course it has to be stranded and tinned wire for a marine environment, so think along the lines of $5/foot. -An assortment of bus bars and circuit breakers. 100A breaker for each battery, 400A fuse for the main connection, $120 bus bars, etc. It was a very interesting project for me personally and really a lot of fun, but solar can easily become a serious project as your scale beyond maybe 500 watt-hours per day. I haven't done a final cost summation of my project but I'm sure it was over $10,000.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoI've heard good stuff about Victron products, especially for boats. Is there a particular reason you chose it? Also, do you have a diesel or gas engine as well? I know larger sailboats generally do; not sure about 37'. Presumably, solar and batteries would not be sufficient to replace that with an electric motor, unless you only used it sporadically. I can't imagine wanting to get stuck for days when it's both cloudy and not windy.
- KirinDave 7y agoOne of the big finds for me when reading this was that it was my first exposure to their vendor, Olimex.
- philshem 7y agoWouldn’t an old Android phone make pretty efficient web server? (24+ hours battery life, WiFi and cellular data, DC charging, low-power built-in display) Here’s a http server: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6329468/how-to-create-a-http-server-in-android#6329508 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6329468/how-to-create-a-...
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoThe display is the worst part of the phone, in terms of efficiency as a web server. There's no need at all for a display; visitors and developers alike connect to web servers from a remote machine. The display hardware and graphics processor on the SOC consume a significant amount of power.
- oarsinsync 7y agoWould the effect of the display hardware on battery life not be mitigated by simply keeping the display turned off? Not sure how much that would help the power draw of the graphics processor, but it would remain idle at the very least.
- philshem 7y agoYes, the idea was to keep the display off. I didn’t think about the graphics card.
- jschwartzi 7y agoJust gate the clocks.
- thanatropism 7y agoUnless you also want to use it as a phone.
- jsight 7y agoYeah, I would think so. The onboard battery is probably more than sufficient on some of them as well. The pi is probably more useful for connecting to sensors and things like that, though.
- jerkstate 7y agoThey explain that they have two batteries (a Li-Ion and a Lead-Acid) but are going to stop using the Li-Ion and buy a smaller third battery so the web server can “shut down” rather than just using both batteries and letting the web server run 4 days without sun. Neat, but this seems like it’s engineered to shut down, not engineered to stay up. I wonder if it’s on purpose.
- Pryde 7y agoFrom https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#offline https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#offline: > Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels. Looks like it's a messaging thing, mostly to show that such a website can be done. They discuss energy usage wrt environmental impact a lot on that page. EDIT: that is to say, it's definitely engineered to shut down, rather than to stay up
- duxup 7y agoWhen I was unemployed a while back i went to sign up for unemployment. You could only do things on the site during government business hours. On the surface it was frustrating, but it also made the site feel 'alive' in a way that I hadn't felt since the days when even professional company sites had an about page that the 'webmaster' created with maybe a pic of the server, or his cat. I have an idea in my head for a sort of "banking" (not a real bank and I wouldn't use that word) app and that it would be amusing to have it recognize bank holidays and typical bank hours.
- colechristensen 7y agobhphotovideo.com observes the sabbath
- duxup 7y agoOh man when I was into photography I remember that. It also gave some character to the site, making it clear that people were behind it. Of course they are, but the site too then felt a bit more personal.
- sdegutis 7y agoThis is the most amusing comment I've seen on HN all year.
- kayfox 7y agoSo does Adorama.com.
- justusthane 7y agoNot really. You can still submit orders and use the site just fine, they just make it clear that they won't process or ship orders on the sabbath.
- colechristensen 7y ago>Open 24/6 >Online checkout will be closed while we observe Shabbat from 8:15pm ET Fri until 9:45pm ET Sat. Although online ordering is unavailable, you may still add items to your cart or wish list.
- z2 7y agoAs the site mentions elsewhere, they have a relatively power-hungry fiber router that needs a constant 10W, currently still running on the grid. In that sense, the website isn't entirely solar-powered. This seems to be the state of things going into the future--computation may get more efficient, but pushing signals to far-away distances will always take more power!
- nothal 7y agoWhy are routers so energy intensive? I would think that with fiber the cost would be that of producing light which seems to be low cost.
- snazz 7y agoTo add an anecdote, those Comcast modem/router combos get really hot and are constantly running their fans. They probably have some pretty poor software on average and aren’t running power management daemons.
- ip26 7y agoDoesn't seem like a design point that any of them ever care about. It's easy to waste a lot of power if you treat it as a don't-care.
- driverdan 7y ago10W is practically nothing. You can get solar panels for under US$0.50/W. I paid $125 each for brand new 300W panels.
- holoduke 7y agoI wonder how long a mini server powered by solar can survive. With the assumption that the server is airsealed and the solar panel cleans itself. Are we talking about 10 years. Or maybe 50 or more?
- Tade0 7y agoThere are known examples of solar panels still working at 70% of their original power after 40 years. All in all it's a rock that generates electricity when illuminated.
- iamleppert 7y agoYou can technically run a full HTTP web server (with TCP/IP stack over SLIP) on a PIC microcontroller, which would be far more efficient than this setup.
- amelius 7y agoBut then the routers would have more compute power than your server.
- ip26 7y agoWould that meet the demand? How does a PIC uC serving static HTTP perform?
- pmlnr 7y agohttp://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200611/embedded-webserver.shtml http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200611/embedded-webserver...
- shakna 7y agoI have been building a web server on an ESP32 since I saw the re-launch of this site with solar. It's been tough deciding tradeoffs, and the way I've munged my images to be smaller still is not nearly as nice as whatever dithering technique they're using. And traffic handling is another thing, what with my not-at-all-compliant socket server crashing as soon as it has to field more than 2000 connections at once, or if any of the connections tries to send more than 54Kb at once. It's not nearly as power-effecient as a PIC, but it gave a tiny bit more flexibility. (Original prototype was MicroPython to prove it would work, which gave me a repl to live-tweak things, and now I'm using C).
- malchow 7y agoIf you find this fascinating, as I do, I have a VP Eng job at a company of ours that recently went public. Ping me.
- punnerud 7y agoDuplicate - Posted the same +40 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19654446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19654446
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- detaro 7y agoindividual submissions without upvotes and no comments do not count as duplicates per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- punnerud 7y agoIf I find info/stories interesting and worth sharing I will share it on HN. Now the point is that I should also try to make conscious decisions on when it is most likely to get votes? (Different time zones/regions = different preferences). But I understand that no votes should maybe not count as dup.
- detaro 7y agoThe point is just that you shouldn't link empty discussions as "duplicates", unless they got many votes but no comments (happens rarely), or something has been submitted repeatedly (e.g. some people submit the same thing every two days). Submissions don't get traction for whatever reasons all the time, no need to fret over it.
- tty2300 7y agoI tried something similar with a 40w panel, 9ah 12v lead acid battery and a raspberry pi. Unfortunately the RPI would always drain the battery to empty each night which I think trashed the lifespan of the battery. Now I just use it to charge my phone.
- jsilence 7y agoPossibly something like an ESP32 would suffice as a web server.
- oh_sigh 7y agoToo bad it is only accessible from localhost. Otherwise you are using a bunch of routers and other infrastructure which is not solar powered.
- sengork 7y agoThis reminded me of Spud, the potato powered server. https://totl.net/Spud/ https://totl.net/Spud/
- Jaruzel 7y agoI find it interesting that the pictures on the site are a) served as lossless PNGs, and b) dithered. Removing the dither, and switching to heavily compressed JPEGs, would reduce the file size of the images by ~60% (I've just done it in Paint.NET), thus reducing network usage per request, which in turn would shave a bit off the power consumption.
- meerita 7y agoI live in Barcelona, most of our days are sunny. I don't think they will have that much outage, only in spring time (rain season) is more or less cloudy, but in general you have really great weather.