Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 365 posts

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#171

Post by VyperCard »

arc-in-space wrote: post #121
stjo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, TIL. It actually makes quite a big difference. Nevertheless I don't actually think being pixelated is much of a stylistic choice. Here [1] they explain how they use dithering to minimise their bandwidth and computational costs. [1] - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low...

Except dithering is not great for modern compression algorithms, making the endeavour mostly performative.

Yeah, I reduced their file sizes in their examples by just setting jpeg compression levels to 7% and had actual grayscale

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#172

Post by citizenkeen »

mattl wrote: post #153
chakkepolja wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?

Bootstrap is unfashionable?

In the same way that Corollas, Applebee's, and Walmart brand jeans are unfashionable, yes.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#173

Post by lucb1e »

java-man wrote: post #159
driverdan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not because of AT&T, it's because of government regulation.

AT&T offers fiber on the other side of the road. How is this government regulation?

Just as a thought, that might be pretty cheap to have extended to your house.

In Germany, Telekom (the formerly-government-owned provider and largest player afaik) offers to dig fiber for you for a "nice" price. But if it's literally about 5 meters it might actually be worth it.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#174

Post by gandalfian »

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…

Though topical thought, the Uk NHS site is text and blue hyperlinks. Its still collapsing tonight because the prime minister just announced booster jabs available for everyone. (Guess what I'm spending my evening doing). So you can't always win.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#175

Post by driverdan »

rightbyte wrote: post #140
driverdan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lithium batteries don't need a balancer either. I've been running a 3.6kWh pack of 12 cells for almost 5 years with no BMS or balancer. I bottom balanced all the cells before building the pack and setup my chargers to only go to about 98%. This leaves more than enough leeway to avoid problems if one or more cells drift. I've rebalanced a couple of cells once because they were off by a few hundreds of a volt. They're…

Hmm ok. My experience with Lithium batteries is with EVs. Do you have a low discharge rate on your pack? Because the EV battery pack needed balancing like every charge. Otherwise it has to be a quality difference.

Most EVs don't use LiFePO4 although some are moving to it. There are also hundreds or thousands of small cells in most EV packs. With that volume you'll get more variation between the best and worst cells. You also need it to be foolproof and require no maintenance.

My average discharge rate is much lower than 1C which does help. The max is around 0.9C but that is pretty uncommon.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#176

Post by busymom0 »

bnastic wrote: post #147

It’s a like a deja vu, this website. It’s been linked repeatedly, for years, having the same kind of discussion on HN over and over

I had a similar deja vu because just few days ago I posted a comment asking similar tech:

> Other than raspberry pi, does anyone know of an even lower powered board which can run a very simply web server (only needs to return a single html file)? I have an idea for a fun hobby project where I want to connect my echo bike (for cardio) to the board which charges it everyday and returns an html with how much I charged it and daily cardio stats. Basically, if I don’t do cardio, then the board won’t be charged enough to keep the site up, so that gives me incentive to do it regularly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409339

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#177

Post by pengaru »

louwrentius wrote: post #161
pengaru wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And lead acid is also terrible for solar applications because no matter the capacity, recharging is very slow. Even solar could recharge the battery, the slow adsorption rate prevents it from doing so. This doesn't make sense to me. Surely you can reach a sufficient rate by adding more lead-acid cells in parallel? You're kind of forced to do this anyways since they don't like being discharged below 50% of their act…

I actually run quite a few of them in parallel, but that doesn't solve the problem: As the other person stated: charging lead acid is time constrained. And that means that you can't fully charge the battery within the time period when you have sun. Lead acid deteriorates quickly if left (partially) discharged. This is why lead acid works so well with cars (almost always fully charged at all times). Depleted lead acid…

Can't you just alternate between sets of cells with sufficient excess capacity then? They don't all need to be in lockstep at the same phase of their charge:discharge cycles if it takes so long.

Perhaps that becomes cost prohibitive even with the low cost of lead-acid, I've never attempted this. It just appears obvious from a high level that excess capacity can overcome all these limitations.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#179

Post by driverdan »

java-man wrote: post #159
driverdan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not because of AT&T, it's because of government regulation.

AT&T offers fiber on the other side of the road. How is this government regulation?

If CA laws weren't so restrictive there would be competition. Without competition there is nothing compelling AT&T to offer better service. The barrier to entry for ISPs is so high that it's essentially impossible in many areas.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#180

Post by onion2k »

chakkepolja wrote: post #118
onion2k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he is talking about badly written JS code serving the APIs and the overhead of it. Of course it's hard to debate whether JS, Java or PHP is most inefficient in that regard.

I strongly believe that the efficiency of an API is 1% down to the language it's coded in, and 99% down to who coded it.
Post reply on HN