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Comment by rigonkulous | Hacker News Reader

It sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine.

I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.

I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..

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I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.

It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.

Works great!

i can think of a somewhat well-known one, but its uptime is predictably bad https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

This is always an inspiration for how close we can get ..

I have solar panels at my house. My laptop, phone, and iPad are solar powered (on most days).

you still need too much surface area and too much storage to generate the amount of power needed

absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale

I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?

Angle though isn't ideal, unless the PV panel pops off the lid so you can position it better (and still be able to open the screen far enough back to read - though that's often not great in bright sun). I remember the OLPC could be run by hoisting a bucket of sand or water up on a rope and pulley on a tree branch and letting it drive a small generator as that came back down - and that was almost 20yr ago).

the mild inconvenience of needing to be in direct sun for N hours always overshadows this

you need a massive efficiency improvement to overcome this

we're still in the calculators and tv remotes level of on-device solar

Sure, so a solar-only laptop is not practical, but generating the power in its battery on your roof is a solved problem.

This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.

I wonder how far you could get if you were really trying. E.g. raspberry pi, eink, etc.

Yeah, I suspect we're mostly quite wasteful of energy.

vim in a terminal could reduce overhead significantly, but if you need a browser for anything you're kind of hosed because they're so inefficient on the whole

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