[HN Gopher] We are now Solar Powered
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We are now Solar Powered
Author : adriangrigore
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-09-26 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.andrewjvpowell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.andrewjvpowell.com)
| numair wrote:
| > An Optus AC800s 4G/LTE modem (actually a Netgear device, just
| branded by the carrier), connected to two MiMO Yagi antennas,
|
| 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...
| [deleted]
| diggan wrote:
| 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: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
|
| 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.
| cfn wrote:
| I had a similar setup running for two years day and night in
| the South of Portugal (also very sunny) without any issues. I
| used two very old 120W solar panels, a Victron charge
| controller and a 60Ah deep cycle battery running a 4G
| Modem/Router/Wifi and a security camera. At the house, which
| was some 300 meters away, I had a Ubiquiti Nano that connected
| to the modem and my wired network.
|
| I suspect a 300Ah battery with 600W solar panels would take you
| through the Winter in the UK and similar latitudes.
| adriangrigore wrote:
| He says he was inspired by https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/.
| anthk wrote:
| A gopher server would be really good to save power.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| ... because no one would use it, so the modem can stay in
| standby all the time?
|
| (The difference in power consumption for HTTP will be utterly
| negligible, and the addition of TLS very slight, amounting to
| no more than a couple of percent in the most extreme and
| pessimistic cases, according to my vague recollection of TLS
| CPU usage from some years ago.)
| xupybd wrote:
| It's really crappy that US ISPs block ports. I'm in little New
| Zealand and have a static IP that allows me to host anything I
| want.
| amanzi wrote:
| The "port blocking" may just be a symptom of how the modem
| connects to the internet, rather than being a malicious act by
| the ISP. CGNAT is becoming a common way for ISPs to connect
| consumers to the internet, even here in NZ many ISPs use this.
| It basically puts a bunch of consumers behind the same NAT
| interface meaning that port-forwarding no longer works.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| He's an Australian, and so am I. His ISP (Optus) doesn't go
| out their way to block ports.
|
| However, he says he's using a AC800s 4G/LTE modem and backs
| that up by saying is using mobile data. The default mobile
| data service from all telco's will use CGNAT and will hand
| him some 10.0.0.0 address. I presume that's because mobile
| phones don't run servers as a rule, so no one notices and it
| saves them a bit of money. They don't deliberately block any
| particular port, but CGNAT effectively blocks all of them.
|
| He could pay a extra and get mobile data with a static IP
| Address if he wished. Not from Optus - they discontinued that
| service (which gives an indication of popular it is), but
| other virtual carriers based on Optus still offer it. I guess
| it's not worth the money to him.
|
| Everything supports IPv6 now, and IPv6 happily carries IPv4.
| Why the telco's are still dicking around with CGNAT and IPv4
| is a bit of a mystery.
| easton wrote:
| I seem to recall hearing somewhere on HN that some ISPs
| even turn CGNAT on for IPv6 connections (in fact, I'm
| pretty sure AT&T's LTE has it). I have no idea why, other
| than people being so used to packets not routing to their
| local box that they've disabled their firewalls.
|
| The people who made that decision probably went to the same
| school that told network admins to disable IPv6 on VPN
| connections.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Even with normal NAT, you have to set up the port-forwarding,
| and you have to know how to do that.
|
| Also, some routers have a bug1 whereby even a properly port-
| forwarded service won't be accessible from within the
| network. E.g., the port-forwarded service "works", except for
| you, on your own network. Really frustrating since it means
| how you connect depends on where you are, and it's a lot of
| special crap needed to determine "oh, okay, I'm on the home
| network so use the internal IP"; almost ended up setting up a
| split-horizon DNS to deal with it2.
|
| 1ISPs will tell you that they "lack a feature". Yeah, okay.
|
| 2but then we moved and now we have a different monopoly for
| an ISP.
| mercora wrote:
| > Also, some routers have a bug1 whereby even a properly
| port-forwarded service won't be accessible from within the
| network.
|
| i think the missing feature is called hairpinning[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairpinning
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| 1) isn't a bug, it is a lack of a feature.
|
| In order to accomplish that you need to double-NAT things
| because otherwise the internal service will send the reply
| directly to your computer instead of sending it back to the
| NAT gateway to reverse the NAT. The router needs to NAT the
| destination IP for the client and NAT the source IP for the
| server.
|
| The thing is, 99.9999% of these devices never even have the
| port forwarding feature touched and an even smaller % of
| the devices where people enable port forwarding care about
| this.
| halfdan wrote:
| Author is in rural Australia, but your point is still valid.
| xupybd wrote:
| My bad. I tend to assume most of what I read here is from the
| US.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| eldersnake wrote:
| Thank you for this, that's really handy info!
| jconnop wrote:
| Very cool, though I'd imagine you'd have a pretty good chance of
| success at just sending the power over that 110m ethernet span.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| > ...bit of reverse proxying with Nginx is needed also...
|
| 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.
| eldersnake wrote:
| Article author here, your question is actually a really good
| one as I'm a bit of an Nginx newb and your comment had me
| wondering that too. However for the past few hours since this
| article has been shared the hits have gone quite crazy
| according to the Raspberry Pis access.log, and the Pagekite.py
| process is constantly around 30-70% CPU usage, implying a heavy
| load as normally it uses nearly nothing. Does Nginx reverse
| proxy cache by default? I'm assuming not given my current
| results.
| mercora wrote:
| no it wont do that by default, there would be quite some wild
| assumptions to be made to make it a default for everything.
| even if cache behavior would be signaled from upstream
| servers properly.
| Jedd wrote:
| > But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data
| allowance ...
|
| 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.
|
| Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently consume a fairly
| consistent 100W, which might kibosh these kinds of cheap and
| cheerful solar + car battery rigs.
|
| 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 _relatively_ cheap for those of us in the middle of
| nowhere, does suffer from CGNAT, which makes this kind of self-
| hosted service infeasible.
| jandrese wrote:
| > Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently consume a fairly
| consistent 100W
|
| Ouch. I hope that's something they can work on with the next
| version of the ground terminal. Do they at least start up
| quickly when powered down?
| jkilpatr wrote:
| The power consumption is a fundamental part of how phased
| array antennas work.
|
| You have hundreds of tiny antennas using constructive and
| destructive interference to steer the signal in software.
|
| This digital aiming is awesome for targeting fast moving
| objects in low earth orbit. But you lose the huge
| amplification factor possible with a simple metal dish.
|
| Combine this with the the desire to use higher attenuation
| frequencies in order to increase throughput and I don't
| really see Starlink's power consumption going down.
|
| That power budget already represents a pretty big victory,
| and any gains will probably go to lower unit cost or higher
| data rates.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Wait, but it already physically moves to track the
| satellite. Sorry for the stupid question but what is this
| digital tracking still for? Sending it to within a degree
| or so is not close enough?
| Johnythree wrote:
| > Wait, but it already physically moves to track the
| satellite
|
| It doesn't. It moves to be in the same plane as the
| satellite, but it doesn't actually track the satellite.
|
| The phased array can only track a single line across the
| sky. The dish moves so that line is parallel with the
| satellites orbit.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Carrier-imposed NAT is a horrible thing, and it isn't clear to
| me why connections can't be given _at least_ a publicly
| accessible IPv6 address.
| conradev wrote:
| T-Mobile switched from CGNAT to 464XLAT and an IPv6-only
| network something like 7 years ago
|
| ... but I believe they heavily filter the traffic in said
| IPv6 network, so that the addresses are not reachable
| Jedd wrote:
| Can confirm that it's truly horrendous.
|
| Since switching to that grade of service I have consistently
| had captcha challenges every time I go through paypal
| (despite it saying 'we recognise you on this device...'), my
| Unifi VPN fails to work, despite following several guides
| specifically for double NAT (I'll probably end up with
| wireguard), and most recently my O365 endpoint failed to talk
| to me, as one of the half-dozen IPv4 addresses they route out
| of had been marked by Spamhaus.org, which a) is identified a
| woeful arrangement in itself, and b) took me two days to get
| rectified by the ISP by switching which address I came out
| with (a minor change which resulted in a 24 hour total
| outage).
|
| I did ask about IPv6 - but nothing about that experience
| screamed 'we're ready to move our customers to IPv6', as you
| could imagine.
| eldersnake wrote:
| That IS true about Skymuster Plus. It wasn't true when I first
| set up this mobile/solar internet solution and back then I had
| to save every gigabyte; admittedly I forgot to mention that in
| the article. Still, yeah, not much can be done about the ping.
| I do have hope for Starlink.
| Jedd wrote:
| Fairy nuff. I only discovered the SMP plans about 8 months
| ago, but evidently they've been around since ~ 2019-08. Not
| hugely well advertised to existing customers, unfortunately.
|
| I'm barely hitting 1GB / month of metered content (but doing
| 300-600gb of unmetered) which is a _huge_ improvement over
| the similar-priced satellite plans from SkyMesh for 70 /70
| (peak & off peak) plans, which involved regular usage checks
| and much fretting over bandwidth utilisation.
| borski wrote:
| > I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed...
|
| I think you parsed it correctly - author is saying you can't
| get away from 600ms latency and limited bandwidth given where
| they live.
| Jedd wrote:
| Aha, okay, that was my initial reading.
|
| NBN (Australia's national broadband system) introduced, via a
| partner, this Sky Muster Plus offering about two years ago,
| that includes effectively unmetered plans, so the claim isn't
| as true as it used to be.
| atvatar12 wrote:
| A webpage, hosted on a Raspberry Pie, still reachable after
| mentioned on HN #4. Quite impressive, why do we need CDN again?
| sofixa wrote:
| For lower latencies across the globe, intelligent caching, not
| having to deal with a server, serving heavy content, etc.
| louwrentius wrote:
| My own blog - running on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi 3b+ was
| also hugged by HN, but it didn't even sweat. [0]
|
| [0]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-
| po...
| adriangrigore wrote:
| Also, solar powered, don't forget!
| Aachen wrote:
| I also had a site running on a server of a few Watts and didn't
| have trouble with the HN homepage at #1. And it wasn't static
| files, it needed multiple mysql queries to build each response.
| And ran apache and php that, yesterday, some people here were
| surprised is still in use - yup it's fine and plenty fast. Just
| don't use wordpress or similar without converting it to static
| pages (e.g. through caching).
|
| I should also look into solar panels. I don't live where I host
| anymore (living in Germany now, good uplinks at home are
| usually impossible or at minimum expensive) so it's a bit more
| complicated but posts like these are inspiring.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I remember a pinephone hosted website working well under the
| pressure of the first position on HN. It looks like the
| secret is really no uneeded data and correctly configured
| server.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| forty wrote:
| Your computer heats air, which is a observable physical effect,
| though an unintended one ;)
| jhgb wrote:
| In winter it could be an intended effect.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Quite a few buildings are heated with datacenter waste
| heat.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I've got a PowerWall and the Tesla app (which shows up-to-the-
| second readouts of your home's production & consumption), and
| it was shocking how little energy refrigerators and freezers
| use. Apparently it's because they're extremely well insulated;
| the compressor only needs to go on to adjust to _changes_ in
| temperature, and if you don 't open the door the temperature
| won't change much.
|
| There were a bunch of other surprises as well. The baseline
| load of my house is only about 200W (which seemed shockingly
| low to me, since I was raised in the era of 100W light bulbs),
| and it includes every laptop, tablet, phone, and battery
| charger that's plugged in; refrigerator and chest freezer; TVs
| and home entertainment on standby; nightlights and other small
| lamps we leave on; clocks & alarms; and everything else that's
| running continuously. Our gas heating system, however, uses
| 500W when on; apparently the blower is electric, and twice as
| much of a current draw as the rest of the baseline load. During
| the winter this is our biggest electricity expense, despite
| being "gas". Dishwashers and washing machines are basically
| rounding error. Household appliances like vacuum cleaners are
| also surprisingly low-current. Anything with a heating element
| is a huge draw though (1-2kW), and that includes clothes
| dryers, electric thermos, Instapot, microwave, oven, and
| toaster oven. I can tell when my wife is preparing lunch by
| looking at the Tesla app.
|
| If there's one thing you can do to save energy, it's probably
| to dry your clothes on a rack outside rather than the clothes
| dryer. We've got young kids so we do a lot of laundry, but in
| summertime probably 2/3 of our total energy usage goes to the
| clothes dryer, and in winter it's split between that and the
| gas heating.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > If there's one thing you can do to save energy, it's
| probably to dry your clothes on a rack outside
|
| Here in NM, you can take a load of athletic gear laundry
| outside to hang up and by the time you're done hanging it,
| the first items are already dry :) In winter, it takes about
| twice as long, indoors. So .. yeah.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Dry it inside in summer for the free cooling.
| mackmgg wrote:
| If you don't need all of the speed, I'd recommend disabling
| power boost. My i9 laptop averages ~10-15W with it disabled,
| compared to the ~20W my fridge uses. Even when maxed out CPU
| it's only ~40W, compared to ~100W with power boost enabled.
| That's more than double the power despite only being a modest
| speed increase!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Given that I spend the day compiling C++ for a project that
| takes 11 mins to build from scratch, disabling power boost
| isn't really viable for me.
| myself248 wrote:
| I'm notionally on-grid, but DTE's reliability this summer has
| been so poor, I've had a lot of time on generator and battery
| to contemplate such things.
|
| Sooooo, this is is one reason I'm trying to move all the crap I
| host on my Synology, to a Ras Pi with an SSD, so I can shut
| down the spinning-rust most of the time. If I don't need to
| bother with a BackUPS because everything I care about runs off
| an 18650 for several hours, that means I can keep sleeping when
| the generator runs out of fuel and just restart it whenever my
| lazy bones want to roll out of bed.
| henrygrew wrote:
| Interested in the custom computer build, care to share some
| details?
| marcodiego wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'd try to work around that limitation using tor:
| https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html
|
| Clients will have to use tor too, but it could be used to
| complement instead of replacing the current solution.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| You could do that, but it would add a lot of latency, and I
| thought that's what the author was trying to avoid.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| From the site:
|
| > 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.
|
| But then I notice some column layout :
| https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/#about
|
| How is that responsive? Well, "inpect" reveals flexbox, which is
| very much modern css.
|
| Still minimalist though.
| htk wrote:
| What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images.
| Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own
| right.
| dvh wrote:
| Because of dithering, that photo is 50kB, jpeg could easily
| have the same size and look much better.
| painchoc wrote:
| Exactly. Dithering creates a lot of noise and PNG is poor
| choice to compress that.
| truculent wrote:
| It reminded me of the images on
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
|
| For example
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H...
| jhgb wrote:
| This photo kind of looks like a halftone printing scan to me.
| In case that it actually isn't, maybe that was just the
| intention.
| truculent wrote:
| The main site (https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ as opposed
| to https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has normal images
| (for example https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e00992
| 29e888330282e1...), so I assume it's a deliberate choice to
| go with the low-tech aesthetic (while having practical
| benefits around bandwidth and so on).
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(page generated 2021-09-26 23:01 UTC)