What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.
Because of dithering, that photo is 50kB, jpeg could easily have the same size and look much better.
We are now Solar Powered
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#12On measuring power and system load to correlate them (something the article mentions) - I would hook the Pi up to something that can measure outlet power consumption and report via USB, and then feed that back into the Pi’s own USB port. Metrics can then be collected and stored, and easily analyzed with eg. grafana. I have such a setup with an old watts up meter, telegraf collecting raw data off a custom script that talks to the watts up via usb, Prometheus for data storage and grafana for analysis.
If telegraf/Prometheus are overkill for the Pi, a cron that gets the power measurement and stores in an SQLite database would do the trick. Or one can go even more classical and use rrdtool to store and plot data, which can then be exposed as static files via the existing nginx setup.
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#13On measuring power and system load to correlate them (something the article mentions) - I would hook the Pi up to something that can measure outlet power consumption and report via USB, and then feed that back into the Pi’s own USB port. Metrics can then be collected and stored, and easily analyzed with eg. grafana. I have such a setup with an old watts up meter, telegraf collecting raw data off a custom script that…
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Re: We are now Solar Powered
#14A gopher server would be really good to save power.
… because no one would use it, so the modem can stay in standby all the time?
(The difference in power consumption for HTTP will be utterly negligible, and the addition of TLS very slight, amounting to no more than a couple of percent in the most extreme and pessimistic cases, according to my vague recollection of TLS CPU usage from some years ago.)
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#15What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.
Because of dithering, that photo is 50kB, jpeg could easily have the same size and look much better.
Exactly. Dithering creates a lot of noise and PNG is poor choice to compress that.
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#16> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ...
I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all.
Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently consume a fairly consistent 100W, which might kibosh these kinds of cheap and cheerful solar + car battery rigs.
Plus I've not seen what Starlink offers in terms of fixed IP, or at least inbound routing. I can confirm that NBN SMP (as above) while relatively cheap for those of us in the middle of nowhere, does suffer from CGNAT, which makes this kind of self-hosted service infeasible.
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#17> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…
Carrier-imposed NAT is a horrible thing, and it isn't clear to me why connections can't be given _at least_ a publicly accessible IPv6 address.
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#18> Indeed, as mentioned earlier, these common internet ports are blocked off at ISP level, so no amount of port forwarding in the router will expose our little web server to the internet.
I'd try to work around that limitation using tor: https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html
Clients will have to use tor too, but it could be used to complement instead of replacing the current solution.
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#19A webpage, hosted on a Raspberry Pie, still reachable after mentioned on HN #4. Quite impressive, why do we need CDN again?
I also had a site running on a server of a few Watts and didn't have trouble with the HN homepage at #1. And it wasn't static files, it needed multiple mysql queries to build each response. And ran apache and php that, yesterday, some people here were surprised is still in use - yup it's fine and plenty fast. Just don't use wordpress or similar without converting it to static pages (e.g. through caching). I should al…
I remember a pinephone hosted website working well under the pressure of the first position on HN. It looks like the secret is really no uneeded data and correctly configured server.
Re: We are now Solar Powered
#20This effort seems to be hosted in Australia, there is another similar project (albeit a magazine rather than personal website) that is run from Barcelona: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ It would interesting to see similar efforts but from locations where the sun is less prominent, although I don't know how feasible that would actually be, guess it would depend on the size of the battery installation to avoid the…
I had a similar setup running for two years day and night in the South of Portugal (also very sunny) without any issues. I used two very old 120W solar panels, a Victron charge controller and a 60Ah deep cycle battery running a 4G Modem/Router/Wifi and a security camera. At the house, which was some 300 meters away, I had a Ubiquiti Nano that connected to the modem and my wired network.
I suspect a 300Ah battery with 600W solar panels would take you through the Winter in the UK and similar latitudes.