Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day

Solar Witch is a little webpage and server which receives and displays messages, so I suppose it's a tiny message board. It's coded in very dubious Arduino C.

It's not a 24/7 website. Depending on the state of the battery, the server itself might run all night, but all the messages it receives during the day are deleted at sunset, and the messaging function itself is only active between sunrise and sunset. This is for two reasons:

1. Less usage of Solar Witch during the night conserves battery power.

2. I like the idea of websites which _aren't_ constantly available. Websites which have to sleep too. Websites living on servers which aren't somewhere in the cloud, but which are bound to a particular location, giving you a sense of where in the world they actually live.

Solar Witch is very much inspired by the solar-powered version of Low Tech Magazine (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) and the not-always-online chatroom Gossips Cafe (https://gossips.cafe/), but at a far, far smaller scale.

PSA: Solar Witch is a teensy hand-written C server running on a teensy microcontroller attached to a teensy solar panel which can only handle one HTTP request at a time and may have buffer overrun issues due to my ineptitude with C. If it's gone down, please don't be surprised, and rest assured I'll hit the reset button soon! Solar Witch encourages patience.

Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
witch.solar

There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like: https://ttm.sh/ix3.png

Cool idea!

This begs the question if we could do the same with data centers: put them into hibernation during the night and move load to the sunny sites. Sure, latency would be higher, but it won't affect that many night-active people. Perhaps it's worth it to remove one use-case of energy storage?

(Yeah, the whole de-globalization and no-data-outside-my-backyard government movements speaks against this. Maybe there's some way around that.)

That's a fascinating idea! So let's dig in a bit.

A lot of places experience the procession of the equinoxes. You wind up with the sun coming up after typical daytime working hours start and often setting after they end for part of the year. In places like Finland, this can mean a six-hour day in December. Some people may be different, but many expect things like Netflix and other entertainment options to work well in the evening. The details of solar power mean that less than 100% of daylight hours are useful for generation.

Further, the decreased usage of local data centers would have to be balanced against increased long-distance bandwidth usage and the corresponding increase in data center usage elsewhere. You would need to over-provision quite a few places relative to local demand to keep up their part in this follow-the-sun.

Let there be no doubt that your idea is interesting. It might not result in any desirable outcomes, though. Naively, it seems like it could get pretty expensive to turn one data center into four or five (with attendant solar farms) with a bunch of intercontinental high-bandwidth links to avoid having to store energy. It might work for some workloads, but seems sub-optimal for general-purpose use.

A more detailed financial analysis is of course possible and perhaps worth exploring! Adding wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear power would make the whole thing far more workable. Or just use local energy prices.

This is kinda what Google announced they're trying to do - move around workloads to run in data centers where Green energy is available depending on weather conditions and time of day so that all workloads 24/7 are run by green energy (instead of just buying offsets).

Edit: Better link: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/247-carbon-fr...