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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

#71

Post by jart »

lowercasename wrote: post #70
jart wrote: post #69

I've been hugging Hacker News to death the past few hours waiting for Solar Witch to come back online. Something like this is the reason why I come to the website so I hope if there's not enough hours left of daylight, where OP lives, that the mods can at least give him or her a redo.

I'm so sorry, I've been doing some digging and I think there's a bug in the way the libraries for this particular board implement a WiFi server! It seems to crash quickly with even minimal code. I'm going to go back to the drawing board and see if I can set up an Ethernet-based server on an Raspberry Pi Pico - they're a bit more battle-tested. I'll let you know in a week or two when Solar Witch is back online!

Email hn@ycombinator.com and ask for a second chance when you're ready. If it actually is a bug in the Arduino wifi stack and you can prove it, then I'd love to read a blog post about it. Especially if you manage to patch it upstream. It'd be a great story. Very newsworthy.

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

#72

Post by contingencies »

jart wrote: post #47
Aachen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master class engineer all it takes is not using it.

Love it. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

contingencies wrote: post #72
jart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master class engineer all it takes is not using it. Love it. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by ceejayoz »

duxup wrote: post #67

> I like the idea of websites which _aren't_ constantly available. Websites which have to sleep too. The local state unemployment office website will only let you complete some tasks during business hours. When you’re unemployed it is a lot less amusing.

WordPress.com's support form used to (many years ago) only accept ticket submissions during business hours. One of the more baffling discoveries I've made on the internet.

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

#76

Post by jhgb »

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…

> 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.

Have you by any chance read Stanisław Lem's The Invincible?

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

#77

Post by a9h74j »

jcun4128 wrote: post #43
snek_case wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just bought one of those garden night lights the other day. Have not taken it apart yet. It has a 2cm x 2cm cell on top and says it contains a 2/3 AA NiMH battery IIRC. Cost about $1.29.

That low price doesn't compare to a larger panel in efficiency, but the installation story is hard to beat.

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

#78

Post by narrator »

Super cool!

To make this extra awesome, combine it with an open wifi hotspot whose only purpose is to connect to the solar witch website. It could send you to the website as the sign on page.

Now, put the whole thing in a water proof case, mass produce, and place these high up in trees at parks. Now you have a super local and cool little cyberpunk autonomous data hangout.

There are a bazillion wifi hotspots everywhere, so noone would notice one more. Also, with no wires and not being visible from below, none would be any the wiser unless they randomly decided to connect to the open wifi hotspot.

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

#79

Post by jIyajbe »

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.

The webmaster at lowtechmagazine.com says: "...Compressed through this dithering plugin, images featured in the articles add much less load to the content: compared to the old website, the images are roughly ten times less resource-intensive..."

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low...

They go into more detail on their github page:

https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design

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