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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#71

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

It's not all so simple. For one, this A20 is connected to a router which is connected to the grid. The connection used is a 100 Mb fiber which - thanks to small average page size and very little JS - is more than enough. The whole thing is in the owner's home. I have a similar setup, and I wouldn't say "This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline" but "This website is served from someone's home, which means it sometimes goes offline."

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#72

Post by pezzana »

This is a fascinating site beyond the power indicator. For example, a recent article discusses low-tech solar panels:

> ... To start with, ever since the 1950s, solar panels have been unfit for recycling, resulting in a waste stream that ends up in landfills. This waste stream will grow significantly during the coming years. Solar panels are discarded only after at least 25 to 30 years, and most have been installed only in recent years. By 2050, researchers expect that almost 80 million tonnes of solar panels will reach the end of their lives. 1 2 3 That is a significant waste of resources and a danger to the environment – discarded solar PV panels contain toxic elements and present a fire hazard.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#73

Post by jolux »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #40
ralph84 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an area where Apple is way ahead of everyone else. A code change that increases power usage 25% wouldn’t make it past CI at Apple.

How many more hardware configurations is Linux deployed on than MacOS? Would it be in the region of 3-4 orders of magnitude more hardware configurations? How long has there been a power consumption focus in the linux kernel? The efforts to reduce power usage by the linux kernel pre-date PowerTOP’s first release and wiki tells me that was 2006. Is Apple way ahead or is it just less popular?

> Is Apple way ahead or is it just less popular?

They're definitely solving a narrower problem but they do appear to have it solved. Is there even a subset of hardware configurations for which this is the case with Linux? (if there is I would love to know about it)

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#74

Post by scrose »

Semi-related —- does anyone have recommendations for where to find small hobbyist solar panels and/or kits to experiment with for small devices like a Pi?

Also curious about how a setup like this compares with using a traditional electricity source in terms of cost per hr of running the site off of solar with batteries. What is the break even point against utility costs over there(if there is one)? And are there any concerns about the sustainability of a setup like this if it’s adopted on a larger scale?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#75

Post by tentacleuno »

btdmaster wrote: post #7

They haven't yet responded, but I wonder if it would make any difference in power consumption (CPU usage, to be more specific) if redbean[1][2] could be used instead of nginx. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 [2] https://redbean.dev

The power consumtpion of that server is honestly great already. Sustained 2W, even with the HN hug of death?!

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#76

Post by superjan »

ronsor wrote: post #3
1cvmask wrote: post #2

It’s at 76% now. In 53 minutes since the post it has gone down 4%. So say roughly 5% per hour as a back of the envelop calculation. That’s roughly 20 hours on a full charged cycle. It would be good to know if there is a fast charge capability of the battery and how long would that be. An hour of full sun a day? Or two hours of partial sun?

One can only blame HN traffic for its sudden decrease.

I clicked the link, curious what the what the power reading would be now. Now I feel guilty.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#77

Post by DietPi »

berkes wrote: post #49
DietPi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a Raspberry Pi, but an Olimex Olinuxino A20 Lime 2 and a 30W solar panel: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware But yes, web hosting, especially for small/mid traffic websites has become very cheap (in power consumption and in money), especially for static websites where CDNs can be used to serve assets and static content from edge caches. A full x86 server or PC is often total overkill and…

Did the author use a CDN? Because that's kindof cheating: you are just having another (free) service burning the electricity for you. I assumed the solar server serves the sites directly, because of this. Maybe I was wrong.

True, in this case it is great, somehow mandatory, that it is fully self-contained :). However, dynamic content like the current power consumption and CPU load would still need be served by the origin, or cached at the CDN with short timeouts only.

Using CDNs was more an idea/suggestion for others who take this project as an inspiration to run their own website even with small hardware, unstable electricity supply and/or expensive/limited bandwidth, where a CDN can further reduce server load and traffic. Also when speaking about efficiency of the Internet in general, using small SBCs where sufficient, a CDN usually serves assets/content much more effective, given a network where a particular edge server is usually closer to the visitor than the origin server, and hardware that is specifically designed and run for that purpose and can be assumed to be highly loaded (less wasted power consumption). So as long as one trusts a CDN, or the content is not of any security or privacy concerns, it is usually a reasonable choice to make use of it :).

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#78

Post by onion2k »

marricks wrote: post #32
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap

Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server.

There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#79

Post by louwhopley »

scrose wrote: post #74

Semi-related —- does anyone have recommendations for where to find small hobbyist solar panels and/or kits to experiment with for small devices like a Pi? Also curious about how a setup like this compares with using a traditional electricity source in terms of cost per hr of running the site off of solar with batteries. What is the break even point against utility costs over there(if there is one)? And are there any…

Sparkfun is a great goto place for electronic stuff like this. However, I’m sure there’s more specialized solar panel sources.

Https://sparkfun.com

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#80

Post by dheera »

widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

I mean, that's because a lot of websites these days are built on bloat on top of bloat. A periodically generated static HTML page is pretty easy to take HN load.
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