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This website is solar powered and running on a Raspberry Pi-like computer
- username234 4y agois this website running on a little computer next to solar panels or is it running in a neiborhood powered with solar panels how is this all set up?
- rdlw 4y agothe image on the home page quite clearly shows the former
- skaevola 4y agoWhat board did you use?
- zachlatta 4y agoThe creator used a Olimex A20 Lime2.
- bwestergard 4y agoLove this aesthetic. I suppose this dithering would decrease PNG file size somewhat, because it would increase the number of repeated pixel subsequences, improving the efficacy of the Huffman coding. But has anyone actually done an analysis of how much?
- alacritas0 4y agodithering improves efficiency because it reduces the bit depth
- cyclotron3k 4y agoAlso, not all types of dithering have regular patterns. And as someone else noted in this thread, a jpeg would offer better image fidelity and filesize than this dithered PNG.
- thejarren 4y agoSeems deeply inspired by https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ - Yes they mention it on their website. Love LowTechMagazine. I've been meaning to try this out sometime. It'd be a fun side project.
- zahrc 4y agoYep. It’s mentioned in the about section
- replwoacause 4y agoThe LowTechMagazine version is way cooler, frankly.
- Gigachad 4y agoI gave it a go a few years ago. It seemed like all the solar battery chargers I could find were for lead acid. So I got one of those batteries you'd find in a UPS and a panel. Initially it was working alright but the battery very quickly degraded to the point the pi would run out of power every night. Realistically just a waste of resources unless you are doing it purely for fun.
- picture 4y agoIsn't fun the main point of artisanal technology projects like this? Did you really expect to save money by using solar at such a micro scale where you get precisely none of the economics of scale? Besides, lowtechmagazine also goes offline from time to time: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#often https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#often It seems like your battery perhaps wasn't big enough, or you haven't taken enough measures to engineer your system. This certainly isn't plug-and-play without getting an enormously oversized solar and battery setup.
- nmz 4y agoIt's interesting that they're serving uncompressed text, they could be serving gzipped content-encoding which would save a bit of bandwidth which translates to power usage.
- pearjuice 4y agoI wonder if putting extensive load on the server could drain the battery in enough time before the sun comes up?
- jovial_cavalier 4y agoI think we will soon find out.
- m4jor 4y agoThe Stats page has a Battery metric on it. Currently sitting at 82%. It has a "144 watt-hour battery" which looks like thats about 38,918.92mAh. Certainly would take a lot it seems to drain it to 0% before the sun came up.
- satoshiiii 4y ago> Certainly would take a lot it seems to drain it to 0% before the sun came up. It depends. Different types of batteries have different recommended levels of discharge. Acid batteries should not be discharged more than 50%, while lithium batteries can be discharged up to 80-90%. The Blue Ion 2.0 lithium battery is the best one available, as it can be discharged up to 100%.
- tppiotrowski 4y agoThe extreme power consumption of a RaspberryPI 4 is about 7W [1]. The battery is 144Wh. If battery can discharge 100% that's about 20 hours and about 10 hours for 50% discharge. This all assumes the CPU is pegged at 100% and it's not an older model which consumes less power. I guess it could be possible. [1] - https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
- Schroedingersat 4y agoIf you put any effort into power optimization you can get an r-pi under 2W at fairly high CPU load. r-pi like could also be one of the much more efficient single board computers that run under 1W
- themodelplumber 4y agoI enjoy looking at dithered images like they are using. It's too bad the lovely dithering turns into periodic-looking patterns when scaled down per the 60vh-width directive in the css.
- Waterluvian 4y agoLike a moire effect?
- floating-io 4y agoThings like this actually bother me. They make it seem like the only way to be energy efficient is to give up all amenities, including aesthetics. This is not the way to promote energy efficiency IMO.
- dgoodell 4y agoI don’t thinks this page is ugly at all. What more important to me is that it loads quickly.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoOh, that makes me think of another interesting angle: Designing pages to minimize energy consumption on the client device. Of course, that probably reduces server load at the same time for some things - fewer bytes moved over the network helps both sides - but also includes things like less complex CSS/JS.
- freetime2 4y agoThe part that bothers me a bit is that the website doesn’t actually do anything useful - there isn’t really any content. I guess one could argue that the proof of concept of a solar powered server is interesting enough to justify the site’s existence - but Low Tech Magazine has already had a solar-powered version for years AND they actually host interesting content. If someone hosts a solar-powered website that doesn’t do anything useful, is that really helping the environment? Or is it just contributing to e-waste when the parts eventually fail? And does it really have a smaller environmental footprint than just hosting a site at Neocities or something? That being said I recognize that this is just someone’s little hobby project, and they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like. My comments are more directed at a general tendency of techies to engage consumerism under the guise of environmentalism.
- zachlatta 4y agoThe horror of someone making something for fun!
- readthenotes1 4y agoPotato computer was cooler Heh
- username234 4y ago[flagged]
- username234 4y ago[flagged]
- username234 4y agoi wonder where this is hosted
- wang_li 4y agoSomewhere in Arizona or on an Indian reservation as they are in Mountain time but they don't observe daylight savings.
- eep_social 4y agoDefinitely Arizona. AFAIK nowhere else does MST without DST. And the photos both appear to be of places in Arizona. Fun fact, within AZ, the Navajo Nation does DST while the rest, including the Hopi Reservation enclosed by the Navajo Nation, does not. The site owner appears to prefer privacy so I’m not gonna speculate any further.
- majou 4y agoThe Yukon recently moved to MST without DST (to ditch DST)
- eep_social 4y agoTIL thank you! I am so glad the no-more-DST train is finally picking up a bit of steam.
- username234 4y ago[flagged]
- pengaru 4y ago> While we are in the process of adding more content to this site, we are proud to be home to the world's first environmentally friendly rickroll. Imagine thinking your pile of consumer electronics dedicated to serving a single frivolous web site is something environmentally friendly...
- deadbunny 4y agoImagine being this fun at parties.
- pengaru 4y ago> Imagine being this fun at parties. It's pretty unusual for a party to fly an environmentally-friendly banner overhead, though it's not something I'd put past the Burning Man crowd. I do like that you went there however, because partying and consumerism overlap substantially. And TFA amounts to green-washed consumerism. This is coming from someone who has spent entire days working from beaches powered by a portable solar panel. It was certainly a celebration of how far solar panels had progressed that the thing could power my thinkpad all day. But it would have been asinine and dishonest for me to portray it as environmentally-friendly. I just added more e-waste to the existing plentiful powered outlets everywhere situation, because I wanted to be at the beach and play with a solar panel.
- rdlw 4y agoIt's pretty usual for someone to make a joke at a party[1], however [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party
- pengaru 4y ago> It's pretty usual for someone to make a joke at a party[1], however Are you saying TFA, green color theme and all, is a joke? If so, I don't disagree.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- schemescape 4y agoI love the concept, but I'm extremely skeptical that the dithered PNG images are smaller than a (much nicer looking, but lossy) JPEG. It's fine if that's the aesthetic they're going for, but it doesn't seem like it would reduce the server load... For the record, one of the 640x480 PNGs is 41 KB, and I just saved an elaborate, full-color (and higher resolution) JPEG at a smaller file size (quality was around 50, I think). The JPEG looks completely fine on my (normal DPI) screen. Edit: It does look like they scale up the PNGs (at least when I view their site), and lossless images definitely scale better. Maybe that was the motivation.
- zackkatz 4y agoThe PNGs aren't optimized—I crunched them losslessly and saved 8%–10%.
- jszymborski 4y ago> much nicer looking, but lossy That's a matter of opinion :P I think the dithering in this case has been accepted as mostly aesthetics on these solar websites.
- nine_k 4y agoIt's fun how futuristic (solar-powered, off-grid) sites pick up distinctly vintage æsthetics.
- bullen 4y agoAnother year, another dithering argument: http://sprout.rupy.se http://sprout.rupy.se, still looking good in 2023! XD On a more serious note, the complexity of decompressing a jpg and rendering color is the main advantage of 1-bit dithering. That you can tell what the picture represents at all with only black and white dots is amazing.
- batmansmom1 4y agoWonder how its connected to internet
- dopidopHN 4y agoThat was my though too. Unless their is a 3G modem and a SIM card it’s not really fully solar. Or a small modem connected in RJ45 to avoid the wifi drain.
- m4jor 4y agoThe solar subdomain comes back as a Cox residential IP address. Its likely just hardwired into his switch/router or via wifi.
- amistad732 4y agoaaaaand it's down
- neeleshs 4y agoPretty cool for the hack factor here. I live in a neighborhood that is on the grid, but subscribed to 100% renewable energy plan. Way less cooler than this project, but I can claim the same (well, renewable) just by running a website on my laptop! :)
- animex 4y agoI knew it wouldn't load but I clicked it like a fool anyway.
- roughly 4y agoI did a similar project a while back - my two takeaways were that you need a bigger solar panel than you think and a bigger battery than you think. It’s not even cloudy days - the difference between the amount of sun on a sunny day in October and December is significant (at least, in Northern California).
- joshbetz 4y agoReminds me of https://scott.ee/project/solar-hosting-raspberry-pi https://scott.ee/project/solar-hosting-raspberry-pi
- DoreenMichele 4y agoNow they need to start a business named Ironwood Solar and make this their business site.
- alden5 4y agoThere’s something charming about a website being tied to something physical like how this one requires sunny weather, reminds me of the blog post “I wish my web server were in the corner of my room” https://interconnected.org/home/2022/10/10/servers https://interconnected.org/home/2022/10/10/servers although if this site is truly meant to be environmentally friendly I feel like that’s completely negated by the fact it uses lithium ion batteries, switching to lithium for such a low power project just moves the environmental damage somewhere else
- alpaca128 4y agoUnless it's recycled or just old unused batteries. Which would be perfectly fine for a project with this size and no targeted uptime.
- hkt 4y agoThis kind of thing is less fun, but more efficient and environmentally friendly: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/29/waste-heat-from-data-centers-can-bolster-district-heat-systems/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/29/waste-heat-from-data-ce...
- doesnt_know 4y agoTechnically not completely powered by solar power, since they decided to include remote analytics[1] served by a cdn which is probably hosted in one of those data centers they mention. :) [1] https://cdn.splitbee.io/sb.js https://cdn.splitbee.io/sb.js
- manmal 4y agoAlso, the hardware likely has not been manufactured in a carbon neutral way, shipping of the components created its own footprint (likely via giant oil guzzling ship), and externals (e.g. DNS) are also not running on solar. It’s a cool project but not as environmentally friendly as it might appear. (If we want to get really pedantic, the solar panels and battery need a few years to pay back their own CO2 debt for when they were produced. This server might need to run 3 years before it’s carbon negative. Maybe even longer because not all of the captured energy can be stored in the battery.)
- betimsl 4y agoOnly the RPi itself is powered by a solar panel, maybe the CPE too. Keep that in mind.
- jondwillis 4y agoI have my router, wifi, and a mac mini server that are connected to a UPS, which is connected to a LiFePO4 battery, which is charged by solar panels. But you don’t see me bragging abo- oh wait.
- solarboii 4y agoI am curious about what kind of setup would be optimal to charge a LiOn array, instead of Lead-Acid. Taking into account the requirements of the project, every solar mppt charger for residential use is very over spec. The typical "solar usb power banks" carry a very small solar cell, and probably don't bother implementing mppt. I am clueless on where to look for a mppt charger for sub 500W installations. Ideally, that supports LiOn to recycle old laptop batteries