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It could also be made with ultra cheap repurposed routers such as the old TP-Link TL-MR3020 or similar ones, whose hardware is really limited for doing anything

It could also be made with ultra cheap repurposed routers such as the old TP-Link TL-MR3020 or similar ones, whose hardware is really limited for doing anything serious but still can run older OpenWRT versions. All it needs is to activate a file sharing service and stick an USB drive to be shared with the usual protocols. I mention it because I've found some at flea markets for 5 to 10 Euros. Actually a possibly better solution would be to use a ESP32-like board (therefore no Linux or any other OS) to keep power consumption as low as possible, in order to supply it through solar power, de facto turning it into a self sustaining device in which passers by could download files or even upload their ones, including messages, photos etc. that would stay online say for some time before being deleted. I have no idea though if the ESP32 network stack implementation and resources would allow that.

sokoloff 5y ago
ESP32 (and even ESP8266) can run a webserver and serve files from flash. It’s not obvious to me that they’d be so much better than a Raspberry Pi, which is < 10W and likely averages ~5W, which is on the order of magnitude of a single hard drive, and obviously much easier to port Linux apps to.
- nucleardog 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't know how useful it would be for this specific application just due to the architecture differences. Just for a off-the-grid file share, a ESP32 with a SD card wired up to it is still a lot less power hungry than the Raspberry Pi. Even under full load with the radios powered up, you're looking at like 0.75W, and when you're not actively transferring anything you can go into any of the various sleep modes and hit 0.05W (modem sleep), 0.0025W (light sleep) or 0.00003W (deep sleep). That's an order of magnitude difference versus a Raspberry Pi. You can easily power that esp32 pretty much indefinitely with like... a 4x6in PV panel. It's a fun thought experiment on where you could toss a little 4x6 inch panel that has wifi and a 32GB microsd card you can access via wifi or something. But yeah, doesn't really make much sense to me in this use case.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
You want a real CPU and storage to serve media files at a good performance, ESP is far too limited, it couldn't even fit a photograph in RAM and its network stack is very slow. Its probably possible, but not worthwhile

sokoloff 5y ago

ESP32 (and even ESP8266) can run a webserver and serve files from flash. It’s not obvious to me that they’d be so much better than a Raspberry Pi, which is < 10W and likely averages ~5W, which is on the order of magnitude of a single hard drive, and obviously much easier to port Linux apps to.

nucleardog 5y ago
Yeah, I don't know how useful it would be for this specific application just due to the architecture differences. Just for a off-the-grid file share, a ESP32 with a SD card wired up to it is still a lot less power hungry than the Raspberry Pi. Even under full load with the radios powered up, you're looking at like 0.75W, and when you're not actively transferring anything you can go into any of the various sleep modes and hit 0.05W (modem sleep), 0.0025W (light sleep) or 0.00003W (deep sleep). That's an order of magnitude difference versus a Raspberry Pi. You can easily power that esp32 pretty much indefinitely with like... a 4x6in PV panel. It's a fun thought experiment on where you could toss a little 4x6 inch panel that has wifi and a 32GB microsd card you can access via wifi or something. But yeah, doesn't really make much sense to me in this use case.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

You want a real CPU and storage to serve media files at a good performance, ESP is far too limited, it couldn't even fit a photograph in RAM and its network stack is very slow. Its probably possible, but not worthwhile