8 ms·

This Blog Is Now Running on Solar Power

227 points by louwrentius 6y ago

louwrentius 6y ago
It is a fun little hobby project. I enjoyed building it, although it's quite simple. I must say that the load on the battery is not equal exactly to the actual load because the solar charge controller doesn't seem as precise in its measurements unfortunately.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  It seems that HN is now hitting my Pi 'hard' but it doesn't even register on the CPU (5% across cores). I do notice a small increase in power usage. I wish I had implemented a mechanism to share my Grafana dashboard tracking my solar metrics. (sorry)
  - vvanders 6y ago
    It's a neat project, we added solar based watering to our greenhouse and having grafana as a dashboard was super handy. Renogy's Rover MMPT chargers speak modbus over rs232 so you can interface it directly with a PLC or other industrial automation tools. The whole thing is self sufficient and was a real blast to put together.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      That sounds awesome! Do you have a writeup about that somewhere? Would be nice to share! I love self-sustaining solutions.
      - vvanders 6y ago
        Not yet although I've been considering it. There's a lot of things that are really handy but not easily searchable(like din rails, they're the lego blocks of industrial automation) which I think would be neat to aggregate in one space.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Please come back in about 8 to 10 hours when the sun comes up to see what I did with the icon (currently a battery).
jcun4128 6y ago
Is it always on? This is really cool. I like the idea of self-sustaining electronics(robotics in particular). I wonder if there's any gain using a UBEC or something vs. the car cigarette lighter usb thing you're using to jump from 12V to 5V. Edit: yeah I was going to say, I think I saw someone do a toolbox build before where it was solar powered/had a GSM module in it for communication... but I don't think it was a website, still neat.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Thank you, yes it is always on. I already have replaced the car cigarette lighter usb thing with a proper buck converter but it reduced power usage with maybe 5% or less. I need to update my article on that.
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    Other thing I was wondering about, I saw you have a percentage on battery what about "hours left". Not sure if that's easy to accurately estimate.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      Even the battery % is a guesstimate, but I think it's possible. It's a nice idea. Thank you.
- mycall 6y ago
  For self-sustaining robotics, do they oil themselves?
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    Haha, yeah it was a bit vague. I have fantasies about building small drone submarines and releasing them in the ocean. Those I don't know how they'd sustain themselves. A little ground rover that has panels on it sounds more realistic. And yeah the life span I don't know how long they would last for. But on a farm or homestead I would like to have little solar-powered wheel-driven drones pretty much that run around and do their own thing. It would be neat though, have a sat module on the drone submarine, and then the sub surfaces at night. I think at my local lake is more realistic. Of course in reality these things would operate in supervision/not break laws. But I saw an intriguing video [1] before and I don't know... it's personification I guess. [1] https://youtu.be/0iDBF23gI6I?t=52 https://youtu.be/0iDBF23gI6I?t=52
bpodgursky 6y ago
Aha, finally a GOOD reason for a website to only work 9-5 business hours!
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I have to thank Gaston Planté for giving me a way to power my blog when the sun goes down. Don't let the sun, go down on me...
lxe 6y ago
I wonder if it's possible to take it a step further and make the pieces that connect the server to the internet (modem, the cable infrastructure, etc...) to run off the grid?
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I wish I could, but I can't. During rainy days, I can't even support the Pi. This is mostly because my solar panel is in a terrible spot and I had to over-size it just to get enough power.
aimor 6y ago
If you don't mind my asking, what was the total cost for this project? I run a lot of website projects off of Pi-0Ws and have been poking around with doing a solar project myself.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Controller is about 70 euro's. Buck converter (not documented but added) 7 euro. Panel was 110 Euro. Extra Sensor was 10 euro. Car battery was free. Maybe + 20 for cables and connectors. Frankly, I'm not sure how economical it is, but it is fun to me.
agustif 6y ago
Love both this and lowtechmag projects, cant wait to get the time/excuse to do this for my own personal website which doesn't exist yet lol
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Low-tech magazine is really worth a visit: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
mbgerring 6y ago
I assume you're paying for a static IP from your ISP, or is there some other way you're routing traffic to the server?
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Both is true. My home connection has a static IP. But I'm using my old VPS with HAproxy (see my article) to either direct traffic to my solarPi or to my VPS if the Pi is down. So in some way you could see that as 'cheating' but I discuss that in the blog.
- NorwegianDude 6y ago
  Even without a static IP, it usually won't change that often. If it does change, then you can always update your DNS with the new IP automatically.
  - miteyironpaw 6y ago
    Quite often ISPs chuck you behind a NAT now which makes things harder.
    - jxcl 6y ago
      I have never encountered this! I’m in the USA. Which ISPs?
louwrentius 6y ago
So, who is going to run a solar-powered k8s cluster based on a bunch of Raspberry Pi 4's and host something more significant?
- other_herbert 6y ago
  A single pi4 has an impressive amount of processing power... In my day job I'm a .net and react guy and I made a proof of concept for a next version of a possible product (tech preview, to show the people that their estimates were just insane - on the high side) on a pi 4, running in .net core on manjaro on my pi4.. this is a fairly intensive thing, using signalR with lots of messaging going on and cpu usage is ~10% at peak... So.. my next task will be to run that on solar too :D
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    I hope you will do that. Please put it on solar :-) and blog. We ran the web on pentiums, a Pi - especially the 4 - should be able to do this without problems.
welly 6y ago
I like this project a lot and am inspired to do something similar. I'm a liveaboard boater in the UK, I have a 55 foot narrowboat with 350w of solar on the roof and a 550ah battery bank. I could probably run my own little server similar to yours pretty much 24/7 as when I'm not using solar to charge the battery bank, I'm using the boat's engine to recharge. So not quite as green but during the months from April to September, the solar panels are enough to charge the batteries every day. My modem/router uses 4g, it's a Teltonika rut950 that is using OpenWRT and has GPS built in which I've been keen to make use of. I'm definitely inspired to do something like you've built!
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Thank you, I would recommend to go for it. Would be nice to tie the GPS into some blog that would track where you are (aproximation for privacy reasons maybe). A floating solar-powered server, should be nice!
  - hugey010 6y ago
    Floating solar powered server buoys, anyone?
louwrentius 6y ago
As stated in the blog, my solar panel produces way more power during 'peak solar' moments than both the Pi and the battery can consume (charging). So I'm trying to keep my iPad charged up with this setup too (kind of a hobby). So you may notice during the day that the solar production is 60+ watt and the load could be similar.
- qqqwerty 6y ago
  Nice! A few days ago I dusted off some cheap panels I had lying around and started using them to charge my phone and other devices. I figured since I was WFH might as well put those panels to use. The added bonus is that now that I am charging my phone during the day, I am less likely to use it. I was also planning on doing something similar to your setup which is why I had the panels in the first place. I have a backyard with decent sun exposure, so compared to your setup, it would almost be cheating. Maybe a blogroll of solar powered blogs is in order!
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Thank you. Please pull through on your project, to start a movement :) Just reuse an old car battery from craigslist or something to power the setup during the night.
zelly 6y ago
Imagine a Raspberry Pi secured onto a tree somewhere being powered by a solar panel and serving a website over 5G. Imagine that Pi is running a SaaS product that generates revenue and pays for its own 5G subscription. Now imagine that Pi is earning Bitcoin, pays for its 5G in Bitcoin, and puts up job postings online to get people (paid in Bitcoin) to provision and set up more replica Pis on other random trees in town.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I'm sorry, I was nodding along when I stumbled over the 'bitcoin' word. That's a big no from me and the reason is probably not hard to guess in light of this project.
  - zelly 6y ago
    If you're concerned about energy usage, there are much bigger fish to fry than Bitcoin mining. But if you want, s/Bitcoin/Libra. A computer can't get a bank account, but it can get a crypto wallet.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      I'm opposed to the whole concept of cryptocurrencies. Google 'cryptocurrencies louwrentius' to understand my position.
      - strombofulous 6y ago
        I agree with that but these are specifically RPIs running on solar power (which, btw, will be useless for mining btc), so they will be completly wasteless (the energy goes to waste otherwise). The only exception would be if you somehow rose the cost of mining for others, which would not happen since you're using pis to mine btc. Except I guess the environmental cost of producing these pis, but unless you buy tens of thousands your purchase would be a rounding error
        deleted 6y ago
louwrentius 6y ago
I would like to see Applied Science (Ben Krasnow) to power his website/blog with nuclear power. I am serious.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Many blogs are probably powered by nuclear power :-)
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    That's also true of solar power :-)
- swampthinker 6y ago
  Can you make the right hand div with the solar status a tad wider? The scroll bar cuts off the units of measure on Chrome + Windows.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    I'll look into it, thanks.
manquer 6y ago
Very cool project . Not to be pendatic , there is lot network equipment between request and the cluster which still very much run on non renewable power. Once starlink is live , perhaps requests between two phased array clients can make networks truly solar .
- hinkley 6y ago
  Have the power requirements of the ground units been published yet? That might be chewing through a lot more power than a terrestrial ISP.
  - manquer 6y ago
    Perhaps it will not be as efficient , however we cannot control the power consumption of the transit on wired or satellite, satellite by its design is going to be solar though. I don’t think ISPs are look at carbon footprint for their equipment at the moment I am side stepping the entire argument on cable laying v sat launch for setting up the infra . Likely satellites are have lesser carbon footprint than cable laying, but there are lot of variables .
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      If we consider carbon CapEx - Falcon 9 is 500,000 kg of fuel. For that amount of fuel you could lay down a trans-atlantic cable. Then conside that sattelites still need to be serviced by large base-stations across the globe linked by optic fiver. Then consider that a single cable lasts much longer than sattelites do in orbit and carries more data. Then conder the fact that radio transmission across almost a thousand kiloneters is a lot more power intensive than optical transmission. Satellite internet is cool, but energy efficiency is not one of it's features.
      - manquer 6y ago
        Most cable laying ships are in 10,000 tonne size , ships this size use typically 50 tones of fuel a day at cruse speeds , cable ships travel much slower than that. The fuels ship typically use is one of the dirtiest as compared to RP-1 kerosene a falcon 9 uses. I am not so sure rockets are not cleaner approach. On the downside The life of a cable is 20 years or more , as compared to only 5 years of a starlink sat . Definitely lot more data can go through a cable , it is not apples to apples comparison .
fluffernutter 6y ago
I ran an esp8266 running a website on Python, powered by a 9V battery.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Awesome! You have a url or blogpost about it? Now put it on solar :-)
  - fluffernutter 6y ago
    Here's the Lua version being discussed: https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware Here's the Python version: https://cuneyt.aliustaoglu.biz/en/installing-micropython-for-esp8266/ https://cuneyt.aliustaoglu.biz/en/installing-micropython-for...
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  This is what i like to see - using actually energy efficient systems for energy efficiency!
louwrentius 6y ago
Please note that mobile users - due to my bad mobile layout - will find the solar stats at the bottom of the page (lot of scrolling).
fsckboy 6y ago
The blog is still "wasting" or "leveraging" the same amount of power as it did before. The money invested / and the solar cells could have been used to mitigate the carbon footprint for other power uses, but instead it's being used here for the blog. Shutting down the blog is how to get back ahead, if your goal is to reduce carbon footprint. just pointing out that the carbon footprint of the blog and the carbon mitigation of the investment are independent events, they don't need to be tied together.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I think this is addressed in the blog, the current setup with the VPS is not gaining anything.
kebman 6y ago
Is this so great? There was some wind power controversy with the Gibbs documentary Planet of the Humans. As I've understood, there are some concerns also with solar power, especially due to the rare earths needed for the construction of such panels. I mean, sure, I love the thought of being self-sufficient and get off the grid, but why are they then also taxing solar cell panels to death?
- louwrentius 6y ago
  It seems that reputable Scientists refute the main points as stated by this 'documentary'.
  - kebman 6y ago
    IDK. A municipality of Kvaløya in Norway were warned against even touching their own tap water, after highly toxic machine oil used to lube windmills had leaked into their reservoire of drinking water. I know this, because I grew up there. So windmills aren't all fun and games, and IMHO their power efficiency is questionable compared to their many alternatives. Norway used to rely solely on hydropower, and were self-sufficient on this resource for many years, but in the latter years, the developement of windmills instead of hydropower seems to be more of a political move than a scientific, or even economic one. Or, well, it's certainly good for someone's economy... But for most people it's just far more expensive, and far less efficient. And, as I've already stated, it can even be dangerous. On top of this, the blades cut down all kinds of birds, and in particular eagles, which is kind of a big deal in Norway since many of these species are on the "Red List" (i.e. in danger of becoming extinct).
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  No these are baseless claims it seems. Similar with the MIT study about carbon costs from making a BEV. A blog that was funded by some PR firm paid by oil companies took that story and ran with it. The points of that blog were refuted by the MIT team later on but no-one listened of course. It has caused significant damage as it managed to stick to the brains of a lot of people. I wouldn't be surprised if that "documentary" was also paid for.
jlg23 6y ago
Nice write-up of a nice project! BUT: This is clearly missing a power saving mode which displays a placeholder page with a cache expiration time set based on weather forecasts. And an 8bit song "Ain't no content when it rains" to the melody of "Ain't No Sunshine" ;)
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Thank you, I will put it on my list for improvements ;-)
jimnotgym 6y ago
Rather than vps backup, why not use your house mains supply as a backup?
- louwrentius 6y ago
  That is a good point. Originally, I was planning on doing so! I have all the ingredients (relais and charger) to do so. Maybe I will implement it at some point.
  - jimnotgym 6y ago
    How would you do it? Would it work to just connect the mains charger to the battery and have it kick in once the battery has reached 70% charge?
- resonator 6y ago
  Using your house's mains is a better idea, but if that's not possible for whatever reason, you might want to look at using a fail-over DNS record rather than a VPS running haproxy. It's not a standard feature of DNS, but some DNS providers including Amazon's Route 53 offer it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover-configuring.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dn... It will route to your solar setup while it's responding to it's healthchecks, otherwise to the failover. Also, depending on how much traffic your blog gets, you might be able to do away with the failover and front it with a CDN. Cloudflare's free tier will probably be enough. If you get too little traffic, you wont maintain a hot cache and it just won't work.
valw 6y ago
WARNING: before anyone gets overenthusiastic, please observe that adopting this setup probably caused more harm to the environment than it prevented. Despite their romantic reputation, photovoltaics aren't green - they cost a lot of (usually dirty) energy and precious metals to manufacture, and are not renewable devices, so you want to make them count, i.e utilize them to a significant fraction of their potential, especially so on a grid like the Netherlands. This is not what this project is doing. I'm absolutely sure the author means well and it sure is an interesting exercise, but this is not what transitioning towards green IT looks like. Sorry if this disappoints people's expectations, but these issues are more and more overlooked. (Can't give you numbers rn as I'm on my phone, but you can work them out from e.g solar electricity emission factors)
- ta17711771 6y ago
  > not renewable devices If this means recyclable, that's slowly changing.
dng88 6y ago
Actually the web site help me to investigate pelican. Quite ok. Unfortunately the gummy frameworks is gone.
jwillmer 6y ago
I'm currently working in my spare time one something similar but with a focus on a water tight box with a solar panel that I can place anywhere: https://jwillmer.de/blog/projects/independent-iot-system-part-1 https://jwillmer.de/blog/projects/independent-iot-system-par...

227 points by louwrentius 6y ago

It is a fun little hobby project. I enjoyed building it, although it's quite simple. I must say that the load on the battery is not equal exactly to the actual load because the solar charge controller doesn't seem as precise in its measurements unfortunately.

louwrentius 6y ago
It seems that HN is now hitting my Pi 'hard' but it doesn't even register on the CPU (5% across cores). I do notice a small increase in power usage. I wish I had implemented a mechanism to share my Grafana dashboard tracking my solar metrics. (sorry)
- vvanders 6y ago
  It's a neat project, we added solar based watering to our greenhouse and having grafana as a dashboard was super handy. Renogy's Rover MMPT chargers speak modbus over rs232 so you can interface it directly with a PLC or other industrial automation tools. The whole thing is self sufficient and was a real blast to put together.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    That sounds awesome! Do you have a writeup about that somewhere? Would be nice to share! I love self-sustaining solutions.
    - vvanders 6y ago
      Not yet although I've been considering it. There's a lot of things that are really handy but not easily searchable(like din rails, they're the lego blocks of industrial automation) which I think would be neat to aggregate in one space.
louwrentius 6y ago
Please come back in about 8 to 10 hours when the sun comes up to see what I did with the icon (currently a battery).

jcun4128 6y ago

Is it always on? This is really cool. I like the idea of self-sustaining electronics(robotics in particular). I wonder if there's any gain using a UBEC or something vs. the car cigarette lighter usb thing you're using to jump from 12V to 5V. Edit: yeah I was going to say, I think I saw someone do a toolbox build before where it was solar powered/had a GSM module in it for communication... but I don't think it was a website, still neat.

louwrentius 6y ago
Thank you, yes it is always on. I already have replaced the car cigarette lighter usb thing with a proper buck converter but it reduced power usage with maybe 5% or less. I need to update my article on that.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  Other thing I was wondering about, I saw you have a percentage on battery what about "hours left". Not sure if that's easy to accurately estimate.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Even the battery % is a guesstimate, but I think it's possible. It's a nice idea. Thank you.
mycall 6y ago
For self-sustaining robotics, do they oil themselves?
- jcun4128 6y ago
  Haha, yeah it was a bit vague. I have fantasies about building small drone submarines and releasing them in the ocean. Those I don't know how they'd sustain themselves. A little ground rover that has panels on it sounds more realistic. And yeah the life span I don't know how long they would last for. But on a farm or homestead I would like to have little solar-powered wheel-driven drones pretty much that run around and do their own thing. It would be neat though, have a sat module on the drone submarine, and then the sub surfaces at night. I think at my local lake is more realistic. Of course in reality these things would operate in supervision/not break laws. But I saw an intriguing video [1] before and I don't know... it's personification I guess. [1] https://youtu.be/0iDBF23gI6I?t=52 https://youtu.be/0iDBF23gI6I?t=52

bpodgursky 6y ago

Aha, finally a GOOD reason for a website to only work 9-5 business hours!

louwrentius 6y ago
I have to thank Gaston Planté for giving me a way to power my blog when the sun goes down. Don't let the sun, go down on me...

lxe 6y ago

I wonder if it's possible to take it a step further and make the pieces that connect the server to the internet (modem, the cable infrastructure, etc...) to run off the grid?

louwrentius 6y ago
I wish I could, but I can't. During rainy days, I can't even support the Pi. This is mostly because my solar panel is in a terrible spot and I had to over-size it just to get enough power.

aimor 6y ago

If you don't mind my asking, what was the total cost for this project? I run a lot of website projects off of Pi-0Ws and have been poking around with doing a solar project myself.

louwrentius 6y ago
Controller is about 70 euro's. Buck converter (not documented but added) 7 euro. Panel was 110 Euro. Extra Sensor was 10 euro. Car battery was free. Maybe + 20 for cables and connectors. Frankly, I'm not sure how economical it is, but it is fun to me.

agustif 6y ago

Love both this and lowtechmag projects, cant wait to get the time/excuse to do this for my own personal website which doesn't exist yet lol

louwrentius 6y ago
Low-tech magazine is really worth a visit: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com

mbgerring 6y ago

I assume you're paying for a static IP from your ISP, or is there some other way you're routing traffic to the server?

louwrentius 6y ago
Both is true. My home connection has a static IP. But I'm using my old VPS with HAproxy (see my article) to either direct traffic to my solarPi or to my VPS if the Pi is down. So in some way you could see that as 'cheating' but I discuss that in the blog.
NorwegianDude 6y ago
Even without a static IP, it usually won't change that often. If it does change, then you can always update your DNS with the new IP automatically.
- miteyironpaw 6y ago
  Quite often ISPs chuck you behind a NAT now which makes things harder.
  - jxcl 6y ago
    I have never encountered this! I’m in the USA. Which ISPs?

louwrentius 6y ago

So, who is going to run a solar-powered k8s cluster based on a bunch of Raspberry Pi 4's and host something more significant?

other_herbert 6y ago
A single pi4 has an impressive amount of processing power... In my day job I'm a .net and react guy and I made a proof of concept for a next version of a possible product (tech preview, to show the people that their estimates were just insane - on the high side) on a pi 4, running in .net core on manjaro on my pi4.. this is a fairly intensive thing, using signalR with lots of messaging going on and cpu usage is ~10% at peak... So.. my next task will be to run that on solar too :D
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I hope you will do that. Please put it on solar :-) and blog. We ran the web on pentiums, a Pi - especially the 4 - should be able to do this without problems.

welly 6y ago

I like this project a lot and am inspired to do something similar. I'm a liveaboard boater in the UK, I have a 55 foot narrowboat with 350w of solar on the roof and a 550ah battery bank. I could probably run my own little server similar to yours pretty much 24/7 as when I'm not using solar to charge the battery bank, I'm using the boat's engine to recharge. So not quite as green but during the months from April to September, the solar panels are enough to charge the batteries every day. My modem/router uses 4g, it's a Teltonika rut950 that is using OpenWRT and has GPS built in which I've been keen to make use of. I'm definitely inspired to do something like you've built!

louwrentius 6y ago
Thank you, I would recommend to go for it. Would be nice to tie the GPS into some blog that would track where you are (aproximation for privacy reasons maybe). A floating solar-powered server, should be nice!
- hugey010 6y ago
  Floating solar powered server buoys, anyone?

louwrentius 6y ago

As stated in the blog, my solar panel produces way more power during 'peak solar' moments than both the Pi and the battery can consume (charging). So I'm trying to keep my iPad charged up with this setup too (kind of a hobby). So you may notice during the day that the solar production is 60+ watt and the load could be similar.

qqqwerty 6y ago
Nice! A few days ago I dusted off some cheap panels I had lying around and started using them to charge my phone and other devices. I figured since I was WFH might as well put those panels to use. The added bonus is that now that I am charging my phone during the day, I am less likely to use it. I was also planning on doing something similar to your setup which is why I had the panels in the first place. I have a backyard with decent sun exposure, so compared to your setup, it would almost be cheating. Maybe a blogroll of solar powered blogs is in order!
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Thank you. Please pull through on your project, to start a movement :) Just reuse an old car battery from craigslist or something to power the setup during the night.

zelly 6y ago

Imagine a Raspberry Pi secured onto a tree somewhere being powered by a solar panel and serving a website over 5G. Imagine that Pi is running a SaaS product that generates revenue and pays for its own 5G subscription. Now imagine that Pi is earning Bitcoin, pays for its 5G in Bitcoin, and puts up job postings online to get people (paid in Bitcoin) to provision and set up more replica Pis on other random trees in town.

louwrentius 6y ago
I'm sorry, I was nodding along when I stumbled over the 'bitcoin' word. That's a big no from me and the reason is probably not hard to guess in light of this project.
- zelly 6y ago
  If you're concerned about energy usage, there are much bigger fish to fry than Bitcoin mining. But if you want, s/Bitcoin/Libra. A computer can't get a bank account, but it can get a crypto wallet.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    I'm opposed to the whole concept of cryptocurrencies. Google 'cryptocurrencies louwrentius' to understand my position.
    - strombofulous 6y ago
      I agree with that but these are specifically RPIs running on solar power (which, btw, will be useless for mining btc), so they will be completly wasteless (the energy goes to waste otherwise). The only exception would be if you somehow rose the cost of mining for others, which would not happen since you're using pis to mine btc. Except I guess the environmental cost of producing these pis, but unless you buy tens of thousands your purchase would be a rounding error
      - deleted 6y ago

louwrentius 6y ago

I would like to see Applied Science (Ben Krasnow) to power his website/blog with nuclear power. I am serious.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Many blogs are probably powered by nuclear power :-)
- louwrentius 6y ago
  That's also true of solar power :-)
swampthinker 6y ago
Can you make the right hand div with the solar status a tad wider? The scroll bar cuts off the units of measure on Chrome + Windows.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I'll look into it, thanks.

manquer 6y ago

Very cool project . Not to be pendatic , there is lot network equipment between request and the cluster which still very much run on non renewable power. Once starlink is live , perhaps requests between two phased array clients can make networks truly solar .

hinkley 6y ago
Have the power requirements of the ground units been published yet? That might be chewing through a lot more power than a terrestrial ISP.
- manquer 6y ago
  Perhaps it will not be as efficient , however we cannot control the power consumption of the transit on wired or satellite, satellite by its design is going to be solar though. I don’t think ISPs are look at carbon footprint for their equipment at the moment I am side stepping the entire argument on cable laying v sat launch for setting up the infra . Likely satellites are have lesser carbon footprint than cable laying, but there are lot of variables .
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    If we consider carbon CapEx - Falcon 9 is 500,000 kg of fuel. For that amount of fuel you could lay down a trans-atlantic cable. Then conside that sattelites still need to be serviced by large base-stations across the globe linked by optic fiver. Then consider that a single cable lasts much longer than sattelites do in orbit and carries more data. Then conder the fact that radio transmission across almost a thousand kiloneters is a lot more power intensive than optical transmission. Satellite internet is cool, but energy efficiency is not one of it's features.
    - manquer 6y ago
      Most cable laying ships are in 10,000 tonne size , ships this size use typically 50 tones of fuel a day at cruse speeds , cable ships travel much slower than that. The fuels ship typically use is one of the dirtiest as compared to RP-1 kerosene a falcon 9 uses. I am not so sure rockets are not cleaner approach. On the downside The life of a cable is 20 years or more , as compared to only 5 years of a starlink sat . Definitely lot more data can go through a cable , it is not apples to apples comparison .

fluffernutter 6y ago

I ran an esp8266 running a website on Python, powered by a 9V battery.

louwrentius 6y ago
Awesome! You have a url or blogpost about it? Now put it on solar :-)
- fluffernutter 6y ago
  Here's the Lua version being discussed: https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware Here's the Python version: https://cuneyt.aliustaoglu.biz/en/installing-micropython-for-esp8266/ https://cuneyt.aliustaoglu.biz/en/installing-micropython-for...
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
This is what i like to see - using actually energy efficient systems for energy efficiency!

louwrentius 6y ago

Please note that mobile users - due to my bad mobile layout - will find the solar stats at the bottom of the page (lot of scrolling).

fsckboy 6y ago

The blog is still "wasting" or "leveraging" the same amount of power as it did before. The money invested / and the solar cells could have been used to mitigate the carbon footprint for other power uses, but instead it's being used here for the blog. Shutting down the blog is how to get back ahead, if your goal is to reduce carbon footprint. just pointing out that the carbon footprint of the blog and the carbon mitigation of the investment are independent events, they don't need to be tied together.

louwrentius 6y ago
I think this is addressed in the blog, the current setup with the VPS is not gaining anything.

kebman 6y ago

Is this so great? There was some wind power controversy with the Gibbs documentary Planet of the Humans. As I've understood, there are some concerns also with solar power, especially due to the rare earths needed for the construction of such panels. I mean, sure, I love the thought of being self-sufficient and get off the grid, but why are they then also taxing solar cell panels to death?

louwrentius 6y ago
It seems that reputable Scientists refute the main points as stated by this 'documentary'.
- kebman 6y ago
  IDK. A municipality of Kvaløya in Norway were warned against even touching their own tap water, after highly toxic machine oil used to lube windmills had leaked into their reservoire of drinking water. I know this, because I grew up there. So windmills aren't all fun and games, and IMHO their power efficiency is questionable compared to their many alternatives. Norway used to rely solely on hydropower, and were self-sufficient on this resource for many years, but in the latter years, the developement of windmills instead of hydropower seems to be more of a political move than a scientific, or even economic one. Or, well, it's certainly good for someone's economy... But for most people it's just far more expensive, and far less efficient. And, as I've already stated, it can even be dangerous. On top of this, the blades cut down all kinds of birds, and in particular eagles, which is kind of a big deal in Norway since many of these species are on the "Red List" (i.e. in danger of becoming extinct).
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
No these are baseless claims it seems. Similar with the MIT study about carbon costs from making a BEV. A blog that was funded by some PR firm paid by oil companies took that story and ran with it. The points of that blog were refuted by the MIT team later on but no-one listened of course. It has caused significant damage as it managed to stick to the brains of a lot of people. I wouldn't be surprised if that "documentary" was also paid for.

jlg23 6y ago

Nice write-up of a nice project! BUT: This is clearly missing a power saving mode which displays a placeholder page with a cache expiration time set based on weather forecasts. And an 8bit song "Ain't no content when it rains" to the melody of "Ain't No Sunshine" ;)

louwrentius 6y ago
Thank you, I will put it on my list for improvements ;-)

jimnotgym 6y ago

Rather than vps backup, why not use your house mains supply as a backup?

louwrentius 6y ago
That is a good point. Originally, I was planning on doing so! I have all the ingredients (relais and charger) to do so. Maybe I will implement it at some point.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  How would you do it? Would it work to just connect the mains charger to the battery and have it kick in once the battery has reached 70% charge?
resonator 6y ago
Using your house's mains is a better idea, but if that's not possible for whatever reason, you might want to look at using a fail-over DNS record rather than a VPS running haproxy. It's not a standard feature of DNS, but some DNS providers including Amazon's Route 53 offer it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover-configuring.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dn... It will route to your solar setup while it's responding to it's healthchecks, otherwise to the failover. Also, depending on how much traffic your blog gets, you might be able to do away with the failover and front it with a CDN. Cloudflare's free tier will probably be enough. If you get too little traffic, you wont maintain a hot cache and it just won't work.

valw 6y ago

WARNING: before anyone gets overenthusiastic, please observe that adopting this setup probably caused more harm to the environment than it prevented. Despite their romantic reputation, photovoltaics aren't green - they cost a lot of (usually dirty) energy and precious metals to manufacture, and are not renewable devices, so you want to make them count, i.e utilize them to a significant fraction of their potential, especially so on a grid like the Netherlands. This is not what this project is doing. I'm absolutely sure the author means well and it sure is an interesting exercise, but this is not what transitioning towards green IT looks like. Sorry if this disappoints people's expectations, but these issues are more and more overlooked. (Can't give you numbers rn as I'm on my phone, but you can work them out from e.g solar electricity emission factors)

ta17711771 6y ago
> not renewable devices If this means recyclable, that's slowly changing.

dng88 6y ago

Actually the web site help me to investigate pelican. Quite ok. Unfortunately the gummy frameworks is gone.

jwillmer 6y ago

I'm currently working in my spare time one something similar but with a focus on a water tight box with a solar panel that I can place anywhere: https://jwillmer.de/blog/projects/independent-iot-system-part-1 https://jwillmer.de/blog/projects/independent-iot-system-par...