This website is solar powered and running on a Raspberry Pi-like computer | Hacker News Reader

This website is solar powered and running on a Raspberry Pi-like computer

solar.leo32345.com

159 pointszachlatta80 comments

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Seems deeply inspired by https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

- Yes they mention it on their website. Love LowTechMagazine.

I've been meaning to try this out sometime. It'd be a fun side project.

Yep. It’s mentioned in the about section

The LowTechMagazine version is way cooler, frankly.

I gave it a go a few years ago. It seemed like all the solar battery chargers I could find were for lead acid. So I got one of those batteries you'd find in a UPS and a panel. Initially it was working alright but the battery very quickly degraded to the point the pi would run out of power every night. Realistically just a waste of resources unless you are doing it purely for fun.

Isn't fun the main point of artisanal technology projects like this? Did you really expect to save money by using solar at such a micro scale where you get precisely none of the economics of scale? Besides, lowtechmagazine also goes offline from time to time: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#often

It seems like your battery perhaps wasn't big enough, or you haven't taken enough measures to engineer your system. This certainly isn't plug-and-play without getting an enormously oversized solar and battery setup.

It's interesting that they're serving uncompressed text, they could be serving gzipped content-encoding which would save a bit of bandwidth which translates to power usage.

More power usage than the compute of gzip?

one time compute of gzip. then you just serve up static gzipped files.

This specific website isn't static, static files like CSS seem to be gzipped.

I love the concept, but I'm extremely skeptical that the dithered PNG images are smaller than a (much nicer looking, but lossy) JPEG. It's fine if that's the aesthetic they're going for, but it doesn't seem like it would reduce the server load...

For the record, one of the 640x480 PNGs is 41 KB, and I just saved an elaborate, full-color (and higher resolution) JPEG at a smaller file size (quality was around 50, I think). The JPEG looks completely fine on my (normal DPI) screen.

Edit: It does look like they scale up the PNGs (at least when I view their site), and lossless images definitely scale better. Maybe that was the motivation.

The PNGs aren't optimized—I crunched them losslessly and saved 8%–10%.

> much nicer looking, but lossy

That's a matter of opinion :P

I think the dithering in this case has been accepted as mostly aesthetics on these solar websites.

It's fun how futuristic (solar-powered, off-grid) sites pick up distinctly vintage æsthetics.

Another year, another dithering argument: http://sprout.rupy.se, still looking good in 2023! XD

On a more serious note, the complexity of decompressing a jpg and rendering color is the main advantage of 1-bit dithering.

That you can tell what the picture represents at all with only black and white dots is amazing.

Things like this actually bother me. They make it seem like the only way to be energy efficient is to give up all amenities, including aesthetics.

This is not the way to promote energy efficiency IMO.

I don’t thinks this page is ugly at all.

What more important to me is that it loads quickly.

Oh, that makes me think of another interesting angle: Designing pages to minimize energy consumption on the client device. Of course, that probably reduces server load at the same time for some things - fewer bytes moved over the network helps both sides - but also includes things like less complex CSS/JS.

The part that bothers me a bit is that the website doesn’t actually do anything useful - there isn’t really any content. I guess one could argue that the proof of concept of a solar powered server is interesting enough to justify the site’s existence - but Low Tech Magazine has already had a solar-powered version for years AND they actually host interesting content.

If someone hosts a solar-powered website that doesn’t do anything useful, is that really helping the environment? Or is it just contributing to e-waste when the parts eventually fail? And does it really have a smaller environmental footprint than just hosting a site at Neocities or something?

That being said I recognize that this is just someone’s little hobby project, and they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like. My comments are more directed at a general tendency of techies to engage consumerism under the guise of environmentalism.

The horror of someone making something for fun!

As I said, “they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like”.

But if they are going to imply that this is more environmentally friendly than hosting a site in a data center…

> Data centers and servers traditionally consume large amounts of data [I assume they mean energy?]. But this lightweight solar powered website relies only on energy from the sun.

… then I think it is fair game to examine those claims.

In all likelihood, I'd say their claims are right-ish. The caveats are:

* has their PV cell been made in such a way as to ever reclaim its embodied energy? Smaller panels tend not to achieve this over their lifetimes, larger ones do. * data centres _where_? If we are talking data centres that feed heat into a district heating system as part of its cooling, then probably not. Free cooled or air conditioned systems probably lose, though.

There's also the matter of designing for a limited medium: over time there's a (very difficult to quantify) carbon saving from serving a site that is small and cacheable vs running some monster SPA with a RoR back end. Think computation-per-request

So.. maybe? It is an apples and apples comparison, but we're not specifying which kind clearly enough.

I’m assuming static content hosted on some serverless architecture (so you’re not reserving CPU cycles when nobody is actually using the site), where the host is able to optimize things pretty heavily.

I’m also assuming that the data center gets a significant amount of their energy from renewable sources. Google, for example, offsets 100% of their energy usage with renewable energy. [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/

Probably good, but again, heat reclamation vs free cooling vs AC also matters. In terms of environmental impact, where the heat goes is of enormous consequence. If Google are using AC, they're raising energy demand and therefore lengthening the road to decarbonisation. If they are using free cooling, that's sort of OK. If they're pumping heat to people's houses, that's fantastic as it displaces their heat demands.

No dispute here that economies of scale apply on the compute side.