[deleted]
Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#82[deleted]
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#83I would love to see this load balance across distributed servers that are under the sun
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#84No post body was provided.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#85Solar 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
Everyone here's over thinking it. Of course you ca. It's just expensive (free shipping though) https://m.de.aliexpress.com/item/1432182326.html?gatewayAdap...
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#86Are 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
> our goal was to not only compress images, but also to call to attention this act of compression
> we found that dithered images can be stretched beyond their actual image size to emphasize its distinct aesthetic, and that these artifacts of compression can become an integral part of the design.
Attention, aesthetic, design. At no point do they even claim dithered PNG / GIF is smaller than a good JPEG. If it was, they wouldn't need to justify it as aesthetic.
What gets my goat is the motte-and-bailey. On the front page for lay people, it's a power-saving environmentalist stance. When we techies press them on it, they admit it's a graphic design fad.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#87I'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!
Could I get on the alert list as well? Emails in my bio, and this is something I'm really interested in!
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#88Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#89Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#90The 'micro' http/tcp/ip stacks on microcontrollers tend to be based on lwIP, which in the default configuration can only handle a single connection at a time.
That means if someone connects to your server but then sends their GET request one byte at a time very slowly, nobody else can connect while they do so.
That's fine for toy projects, but not really acceptable performance even for a consumer grade product - despite the fact this lwIP stack ships on lots of IoT devices.