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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

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Re: Internet in a Box

#101

Post by jzemeocala »

VikingCoder wrote: post #97

So if I bought the $58 one from the Wikipedia Store... What exact solar products (panels, battery, converter?) would I need to buy, near Chicago, to run one of these 24/7, year round, and let's say it's gotta be up and running most of the time - say, 99% of the time. (That means it can be down over 3 days a year, and still be acceptable to me.)

I actually did something just like this with the second raspberry pi and an offline copy of Wikipedia.

Although I don't know this devices specs I recall being able to reliably power the pi 2b + a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a random 15,000mah solar power Bank from amazon

Re: Internet in a Box

#102

Post by godelski »

VikingCoder wrote: post #97

So if I bought the $58 one from the Wikipedia Store... What exact solar products (panels, battery, converter?) would I need to buy, near Chicago, to run one of these 24/7, year round, and let's say it's gotta be up and running most of the time - say, 99% of the time. (That means it can be down over 3 days a year, and still be acceptable to me.)

It is running a Pi Zero 2 W, and that should run max draw 2.5A@5V (12.5W)[0]. So a Watt hr is using a Watt for an hour. So the question is how many hours continuously you would allow your Pi to run. For 24hrs, that's 24hrs*12.5W = 300Whrs. Just for an estimate, a shargeek is $100 and will give you 24 Whrs[1]. I'm sure you could build your own solution for much better, but assuming since you're asking, I'm assuming this isn't a great option.

So probably a bit more expensive than you're thinking. Especially if you're putting it outside, as you'll need to make the thing more secure from weather. But also the good news is you probably aren't going to actually be pulling those 12.5Ws on your pi. You should probably measure and see.

For solar, I'm not sure especially since you'll need to adjust for your requirements. But there are nice resources that can tell you average capacity, but be careful to note that these will usually show averages and you're going to be significantly affected by seasons in Chicago.

Honestly, I'd get a small battery (like for a phone) and hook it up to an outlet and tuck it away somewhere. That's a much cheaper option. Even if you're "going rogue" with it... the power draw is so little you won't really notice it.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/getting-...

[1] https://sharge.com/products/shargeek-170

Re: Internet in a Box

#104

Post by petesergeant »

Surprised that there are still so many people without access to the internet[0], and even more surprised that that's true in India and China, both of which have pretty high population densities (in most areas, but also, those are the areas people live in, obviously).

> But these user figures also suggest that 652 million people in India did not use the internet at the beginning of 2025, suggesting that 44.7 percent of the population remained “offline” at the start of the year.[1]

I guess I'm mentally comparing this to SE Asia, where smart phone usage (and cell coverage) is ubiquitous; Vietnam at 80%, Philippines at 75%, Thailand at literally everyone. Fewer in Indonesia, but geography there is especially challenging

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155552/countries-highes...

1: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-india

Re: Internet in a Box

#105

Post by varenc »

VikingCoder wrote: post #97

So if I bought the $58 one from the Wikipedia Store... What exact solar products (panels, battery, converter?) would I need to buy, near Chicago, to run one of these 24/7, year round, and let's say it's gotta be up and running most of the time - say, 99% of the time. (That means it can be down over 3 days a year, and still be acceptable to me.)

A 50Ah 12V deep cycle car battery would give you at most 600Wh. This RPi's max draw is 12.5W, but an average draw is 6W is probably reasonable. So that battery alone would get you at most `600 watt-hours / 6 watts = 100 hours` of run time (minus some voltage conversion loss and other imperfections). Then just hook up some solar to charge the battery and assume at least 25% loss. ~70W should probably be enough even for a Chicago winter. The RPi might actually idle at around 1W making it even easier.

All that said, there might be a better solution for you if 99% uptime offline personal Wikipedia is your only goal. And IIAB isn't really optimized for high availability I assume. (just get a local copy of Kiwix on your phone+laptop? Or a cheap dedicated tablet for Kiwix would probably cost less than the battery+solar setup)

Re: Internet in a Box

#106

Post by Akatama »

Hey everyone!

I actually recently learned about Internet-in-a-Box myself and started contributing. Its cool to see that for the most part people seem to think this is a positive idea! Internet-in-a-Box has been around for a while (at least 10 years) and it's a great project with a lot of very passionate people working on it.

Re: Internet in a Box

#108

Post by dachris »

flaburgan wrote: post #26

With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…

If the internet would go offline "for real" even for days, all hell would break lose. It would not be as bad as electricity going offline, but it's in the same category now. No credit card payments payments (food, gas), no logistics. Prepper stuff.

The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.

So archiving is good anyways.

To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).

Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.

Re: Internet in a Box

#109

Post by dredmorbius »

asdefghyk wrote: post #59

This article made me remember, that in the early 90s there was a service to retrieve any webpage by email

RMS still largely browses in this way:

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git>) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html>

Re: Internet in a Box

#110

Post by Geo_ge »

VikingCoder wrote: post #97

So if I bought the $58 one from the Wikipedia Store... What exact solar products (panels, battery, converter?) would I need to buy, near Chicago, to run one of these 24/7, year round, and let's say it's gotta be up and running most of the time - say, 99% of the time. (That means it can be down over 3 days a year, and still be acceptable to me.)

I'm running a Raspberry Pi based GNSS receiver from a 26 Ah SLA battery and an 80W panel. Just passed 2 weeks of uptime in a cloudy period of southern hemisphere autumn.

A monte carlo simulation using historical conditions said it had a ~95% chance of no downtime over 3 winter months. A slightly larger battery would bring that up to 99%.

The Pi (3b+), GNSS reciever (u-blox ZED F9P), and Waveshare 7600G 4G modem average about 3.5W idle. The GNSS reciever is about 0.1 - 0.2 W of that. Wifi would be more energy efficient, I imagine.

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