Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor.<p>The refridgerator literally has directly observable physical effects on the world - chilled wine! - and yet it uses less power than a device doing symbolic operations all day.
> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ...<p>I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all.<p>Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently consume a fairly consistent 100W, which might kibosh these kinds of cheap and cheerful solar + car battery rigs.<p>Plus I've not seen what Starlink offers in terms of fixed IP, or at least inbound routing. I can confirm that NBN SMP (as above) while <i>relatively</i> cheap for those of us in the middle of nowhere, does suffer from CGNAT, which makes this kind of self-hosted service infeasible.
> Indeed, as mentioned earlier, these common internet ports are blocked off at ISP level, so no amount of port forwarding in the router will expose our little web server to the internet.<p>I'd try to work around that limitation using tor: <a href="https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html" rel="nofollow">https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html</a><p>Clients will have to use tor too, but it could be used to complement instead of replacing the current solution.
On measuring power and system load to correlate them (something the article mentions) - I would hook the Pi up to something that can measure outlet power consumption and report via USB, and then feed that back into the Pi’s own USB port. Metrics can then be collected and stored, and easily analyzed with eg. grafana. I have such a setup with an old watts up meter, telegraf collecting raw data off a custom script that talks to the watts up via usb, Prometheus for data storage and grafana for analysis.<p>If telegraf/Prometheus are overkill for the Pi, a cron that gets the power measurement and stores in an SQLite database would do the trick. Or one can go even more classical and use rrdtool to store and plot data, which can then be exposed as static files via the existing nginx setup.
> …bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also…<p>Nginx reverse proxy has capability of caching static assets, does it mean most of the website is actually being served by cloud? So, technically raspberry pie should be consuming power only when cache timesout.
This effort seems to be hosted in Australia, there is another similar project (albeit a magazine rather than personal website) that is run from Barcelona: <a href="https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/" rel="nofollow">https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/</a><p>It would interesting to see similar efforts but from locations where the sun is less prominent, although I don't know how feasible that would actually be, guess it would depend on the size of the battery installation to avoid the fluctuations. Also projects powered by alternative means (wind and hydro comes to mind) would be awesome to see.
> An Optus AC800s 4G/LTE modem (actually a Netgear device, just branded by the carrier), connected to two MiMO Yagi antennas,<p>I have a feeling that the best case / worst case scenario on what powers that remote 4G tower will disappoint a lot of people hoping this is a zero carbon footprint endeavor...
From the site:<p>> I'm fairly familiar with CSS3 and all the new whizz bang CSS things that I could very well use to make this fancy looking, but I decided to go the simplest route. [...] Also it's basically mobile responsive out of the box.<p>But then I notice some column layout : <a href="https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about" rel="nofollow">https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about</a><p>How is that responsive? Well, "inpect" reveals flexbox, which is very much modern css.<p>Still minimalist though.