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.
Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
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Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#22A similarly inspired project - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com (and the power data - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html )
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#23The 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.
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' :-)
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#24Cool 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'…
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 ?
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lorawan would not provide a very pleasant user experience.
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.
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.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#26A similarly inspired project - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com (and the power data - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html )
OP mentions this project as a direct inspiration.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#27Cool 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'…
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Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#28A similarly inspired project - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com (and the power data - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html )
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Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#29The 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.
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Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#30I 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. ESP0…
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.