A website that runs on a solar-powered server in Barcelona
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
You could only do things on the site during government business hours.
On the surface it was frustrating, but it also made the site feel 'alive' in a way that I hadn't felt since the days when even professional company sites had an about page that the 'webmaster' created with maybe a pic of the server, or his cat.
I have an idea in my head for a sort of "banking" (not a real bank and I wouldn't use that word) app and that it would be amusing to have it recognize bank holidays and typical bank hours.
We had a thriving BBS scene despite been a poor northern town because of a historical oddity that meant local calls cost a fixed price whether they lasted 30s or two hours.
I love my modern computers but there was something cool about computers then (or simply the optimism of youth).
It felt like they where going to change everything..and then they only sorta did and not always in ways I’d have wanted.
I guess that’s what people thought of the telephone, wireless and steam engine though.
If you're still interested, basically I opened my Poste account in the city where I lived as a student at the time. I then graduated and moved elsewhere, but when my debit card expired, I got a letter that told me to pick up my new one... in the old city's office, hours away from my home. There was no way I was going to lose a day just to go there, pick up the card and go back, so I decided to just open a bank account somewhere else. But then I couldn't move my money there because the Poste debit card acts as an authentication device (you swipe it into the OTP device that Poste provides), both on the website and in person, so I couldn't transfer or withdraw my money, or even close my account at an office. I had to spend money to send a _raccomandata_ and wait 30 days for my money to finally be transferred to my new account. Fun times.
Still to this day the single bank that never incurred any fees for using their ATMs as a foreigner - at least that's my experience.
With HolyClock you can prevent desecration of Shabbat by visitors of your website. A visitor who is located where Shabbat has begun, is redirected to a temporary closing page until Shabbat ends. """
It also gave some character to the site, making it clear that people were behind it. Of course they are, but the site too then felt a bit more personal.
- Forex buys and sells are disabled
- "Large" transfers are disabled (over some silly amount on the order of $2K)
- And my personal favorite, you can't see or pay your credit card bill (for Mastercard ONLY), and you get a "this function is not available right now, call the bank at $BANK_WORKING_HOURS_ONLY_NUMBER" message.
What was your home currency? Was it subject to any currency controls?
Here’s a http server: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6329468/how-to-create-a-...
Not sure how much that would help the power draw of the graphics processor, but it would remain idle at the very least.
What I don't understand is why nobody does some kind of cheap battery backup for PC. Even cheapest UPS costs a lot and good UPS costs like a PC. While laptop battery is pretty cheap and provides a lot of power. All I need is few seconds to properly turn off the machine when power cuts.
Serves a website from the app on your phone, and their service acts as a proxy to send traffic there.
Very interesting!
I'm sure the average website of 10/20 years ago uses less resources, and by extension power than the current average website.
I suppose you could argue we do more with each unit of power, I would contend most of that has been wasted on non core frivolities that aren't worth the cost though.
Content providers however haven't really done much. Do you think app and web developers give much thought to battery life when they make their products? If they ever optimize it's for reasons such as responsiveness (which drives customers away if it's poor), and battery life is at best a sideeffect.
First, you can't really know how various things are implemented in hardware. Something that saves power on one machine will increase power usage on another. This would be a big step backwards in terms of abstraction.
Second, and more important IMO, is that it's just not our job. Hardware people should make efficient hardware, and software people should make efficient software. The meaning of efficient depends on the context.
Much software doesn’t need to be efficient in design, just efficient in terms of developer time. But if power consumption is a consideration, making the software itself more efficient in its design (if not implementation details) becomes more of a requirement.
And, finally, there’s always people writing embedded/firmware. The line between software and hardware is blurry.
I also wonder if by optimizing for some combination of battery life, battery size, device size, Cost, QPS required, Sensors on-board we'll end up with something that has interesting monitoring capabilities in very remote regions.
-4x 100 Ah LiFePo4 batteries (BattleBorn brand)
-3000 watt charger/inverter unit (Victron MultiPlus)
-3x 360 watt solar panels (LG Neon R)
-Solar charge controller (Victon SmartSolar)
-System controller (Victron ColorControl GX)
-Battery monitor (Victron BMV)
-A lot of heavy wiring, ranging from 4 gauge to 4/0 gauge. Some segments are designed to handle 400 amps (12V DC, if my system was any larger I would have gone with a 24V or 48V design to keep wire sizes reasonable). Of course it has to be stranded and tinned wire for a marine environment, so think along the lines of $5/foot.
-An assortment of bus bars and circuit breakers. 100A breaker for each battery, 400A fuse for the main connection, $120 bus bars, etc.
It was a very interesting project for me personally and really a lot of fun, but solar can easily become a serious project as your scale beyond maybe 500 watt-hours per day. I haven't done a final cost summation of my project but I'm sure it was over $10,000.
Also, do you have a diesel or gas engine as well? I know larger sailboats generally do; not sure about 37'. Presumably, solar and batteries would not be sufficient to replace that with an electric motor, unless you only used it sporadically. I can't imagine wanting to get stuck for days when it's both cloudy and not windy.
We have a 36 HP Yanmar 3JH2E so that would be about 27,000 watts. Now say that wanted to give up the ability to approach hull speed while motoring, maybe 1/2 of that would be OK. So call it 12,000 watts, or 1000 Ah in a 12V system to motor for an hour. Our batteries were close enough to $1,000 for 100Ah so it will cost you $10,000 to have enough batteries to motor for 1 hour.
The solar capacity to get you into the barest realm of running that motor or charging a sufficient battery bank would be 3000 watts...minimum. The most I have heard of on a 40-50 foot monohull is 2400 watts. A catamaran could get you there, but you will give up looks and be spending $100,000+ on panels, controllers, wiring, mounting, etc. And weight is crucial on a catamaran so bust out more cash to make it lightweight.
All this means that realistically you will have 1 hour or less of electric motor run time. I have only been sailing for 5 months so take this with a grain of salt, but I usually have somewhere to get to before dark and I also don't enjoy waiting days for favorable weather or inching along at 4 knots in crappy wind. And I like traveling on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. I use the engine to keep our speed above 6 knots. So if I was to go with electrical propulsion I would put in a generator (probably a DC generator).
Sailing Uma has some YouTube videos about electric propulsion on their sailboat. Their style of travel is much different than mine. They sail a lot more!
All of their components network together using a documented protocol. Their color control panel runs a custom Linux distro[1] and MQTT which can be used to monitor everything and change settings. They have a lot of open source too.[2]
The solar is the easy part. It's everything else that makes it complicated.
is still more readable.
This does highlight a possible new definition for 'progressive' websites. Websites that add features as more power is available.
It's been tough deciding tradeoffs, and the way I've munged my images to be smaller still is not nearly as nice as whatever dithering technique they're using.
And traffic handling is another thing, what with my not-at-all-compliant socket server crashing as soon as it has to field more than 2000 connections at once, or if any of the connections tries to send more than 54Kb at once.
It's not nearly as power-effecient as a PIC, but it gave a tiny bit more flexibility. (Original prototype was MicroPython to prove it would work, which gave me a repl to live-tweak things, and now I'm using C).
Neat, but this seems like it’s engineered to shut down, not engineered to stay up. I wonder if it’s on purpose.
> Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels.
Looks like it's a messaging thing, mostly to show that such a website can be done. They discuss energy usage wrt environmental impact a lot on that page.
EDIT: that is to say, it's definitely engineered to shut down, rather than to stay up
Removing the dither, and switching to heavily compressed JPEGs, would reduce the file size of the images by ~60% (I've just done it in Paint.NET), thus reducing network usage per request, which in turn would shave a bit off the power consumption.
edit - thinking about it, I am a mile off. Will be something like compiling a custom server and having no OS.
All in all it's a rock that generates electricity when illuminated.
But I understand that no votes should maybe not count as dup.