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Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

witch.solar

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Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#41

Post by lessname »

bubba_sparks wrote: post #31

I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online. Progress marches forward one baby step at a…

Then humans try to darken the sky, which results in robots using humans as a source of power. Sounds familiar.

Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#42

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #40
bubba_sparks wrote: post #31

I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online. Progress marches forward one baby step at a…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#43

Post by jcun4128 »

snek_case wrote: post #30
jcun4128 wrote: post #14

I 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 enoug…

Yeah you can go hardcore. I remember seeing someone make a toolbox server that they put on a roof, it might have been posted here actually.

I was just looking at small things like those garden night lights you can stake into the ground, has a solar cell on it.

Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#46

Post by debesyla »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #44

Solar energy is too unpredictable and can't serve as a reliable source of power. We should be thinking about servers running on nuclear power.

You got me thinking... Are there any ways for a simple person to make it's own nuclear power reactor? You know, wind and solar is just "buy from internets and plug in", mostly, but what about nuclear? Would it even be legal? :-D

Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#47

Post by jart »

Aachen wrote: post #32
lowercasename wrote: post #3

There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like: https://ttm.sh/ix3.png

HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge. People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", p…

That's because people are so accustomed to leveraging mountains of free candy that they've forgotten that a web page can be served with less than 1000ms of cpu time. I got a job once when I told a story about a web app I wrote was going viral getting a million visitors a day while I was strolling in the park. The web servers I write only need a single system call (writev) to serve gzip encoded assets so wrk says they can do a million requests per second on one pc. So it's not like it was any kind of big technical achievement even though it was a technical job. My point is that we're drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master class engineer all it takes is not using it.

Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#49

Post by lowercasename »

akeck wrote: post #45

Are dithered images better for power consumption? I see them on a lot of solar-powered pages. I did some experiments in GIMP and couldn't make a dithered image much smaller than a heavily compressed grayscale that looked a lot better.

Not as far as I can tell! Absolutely ashamed to say I did it because it looked cool. I did manage to get the dithered GIF down to 7KB, but I think I could have done the same with a limited palette and no dithering.

Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

#50

Post by akeck »

lowercasename wrote: post #49
akeck wrote: post #45

Are dithered images better for power consumption? I see them on a lot of solar-powered pages. I did some experiments in GIMP and couldn't make a dithered image much smaller than a heavily compressed grayscale that looked a lot better.

Not as far as I can tell! Absolutely ashamed to say I did it because it looked cool. I did manage to get the dithered GIF down to 7KB, but I think I could have done the same with a limited palette and no dithering.

They do have wonderful look. Reminds me of the mid 1990s web. Edit: Btw, I love solar-powered projects. Thanks so much for sharing!
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