A website that runs on a solar-powered server in Barcelona

When I was unemployed a while back i went to sign up for unemployment.<p>You could only do things on the site during government business hours.<p>On the surface it was frustrating, but it also made the site feel &#x27;alive&#x27; in a way that I hadn&#x27;t felt since the days when even professional company sites had an about page that the &#x27;webmaster&#x27; created with maybe a pic of the server, or his cat.<p>I have an idea in my head for a sort of &quot;banking&quot; (not a real bank and I wouldn&#x27;t use that word) app and that it would be amusing to have it recognize bank holidays and typical bank hours.

Wouldn’t an old Android phone make pretty efficient web server? (24+ hours battery life, WiFi and cellular data, DC charging, low-power built-in display)<p>Here’s a http server: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;6329468&#x2F;how-to-create-a-http-server-in-android#6329508" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;6329468&#x2F;how-to-create-a-...</a>

Presumably to optimise this website would mean different things? For example would it be better to read from the flash drive or cache things in RAM power-output-wise? I think that&#x27;s a question we never ask. We would for example consider a memcache versus none for performance reasons but probably never for power output reasons.<p>Very interesting!

Great idea to show viability of solar setups! I’ve installed a simple solar panel &#x2F; charge controller &#x2F; battery solution in a van and was surprised how simple it is to get up and running. The tech is really reliable and is super affordable.

Previously on Hacker News: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19407847" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19407847</a>

As the site mentions elsewhere, they have a relatively power-hungry fiber router that needs a constant 10W, currently still running on the grid. In that sense, the website isn&#x27;t entirely solar-powered. This seems to be the state of things going into the future--computation may get more efficient, but pushing signals to far-away distances will always take more power!

Very cool project. Will the traffic boost from HN first page throw electricity consumption over an edge?

One of the big finds for me when reading this was that it was my first exposure to their vendor, Olimex.

You can technically run a full HTTP web server (with TCP&#x2F;IP stack over SLIP) on a PIC microcontroller, which would be far more efficient than this setup.

They explain that they have two batteries (a Li-Ion and a Lead-Acid) but are going to stop using the Li-Ion and buy a smaller third battery so the web server can “shut down” rather than just using both batteries and letting the web server run 4 days without sun.<p>Neat, but this seems like it’s engineered to shut down, not engineered to stay up. I wonder if it’s on purpose.

I find it interesting that the pictures on the site are a) served as lossless PNGs, and b) dithered.<p>Removing the dither, and switching to heavily compressed JPEGs, would reduce the file size of the images by ~60% (I&#x27;ve just done it in Paint.NET), thus reducing network usage per request, which in turn would shave a bit off the power consumption.

I live in Barcelona, most of our days are sunny. I don&#x27;t think they will have that much outage, only in spring time (rain season) is more or less cloudy, but in general you have really great weather.

I tried something similar with a 40w panel, 9ah 12v lead acid battery and a raspberry pi. Unfortunately the RPI would always drain the battery to empty each night which I think trashed the lifespan of the battery. Now I just use it to charge my phone.

Would be interesting to see the spec required for doing the same thing, but with 99.9% uptime.

I wonder how long a mini server powered by solar can survive. With the assumption that the server is airsealed and the solar panel cleans itself. Are we talking about 10 years. Or maybe 50 or more?

This reminded me of Spud, the potato powered server.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;totl.net&#x2F;Spud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;totl.net&#x2F;Spud&#x2F;</a>

Too bad it is only accessible from localhost. Otherwise you are using a bunch of routers and other infrastructure which is not solar powered.

If you find this fascinating, as I do, I have a VP Eng job at a company of ours that recently went public. Ping me.

Duplicate - Posted the same +40 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19654446" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19654446</a>