Solar Adventures

Here are a bunch of my assorted, non-blog-type thoughts about solarpunk, the climate crisis, and adjacent technology.

I'll be honest, I'm not currently running this capsule (or any of my services) on a solar-powered device. It's hosted at Hetzner and probably will be for the foreseeable future. It does make sense that it'll be rehosted somewhere someday, but that day is not today.

Solarport

Here's the tentative design for my future "solarport" (a name I heard used that I think is cool for this type of thing).

Components:

A large custom 3D-printed shell (design undetermined)

Detachable solar panels on top (not sure how I plan on doing that just yet)

A battery attached to the solar panels

A battery attached to the board (the panels battery would charge this one, which would then be actually used by the board)

A Pine64 SOPINE clusterboard (or something similar)

An E-ink display of some kind on the front, probably the six-color one

Notes:

I think I want the solar panels to be on their own small unit, which consists of the panels, a thin wide battery, and some power transfer mechanism: Qi wireless charging (see next note), metal contacts (which seems unsafe), or something else. The idea is I can just lift that unit off and put it in a window to charge it. That's also why there are two batteries, one on the panels unit and one on the head unit: so I can lift off the panels to gain some sun power, while the head unit continues to operate somewhere more convenient (right now, it'll be behind my TV).

I think Qi2 sounds like the best idea now, especially once I can get a charger and receiver that support higher transfer speeds. They'll be aligned anyway so they'll stay cool and receive the full 15 watts they're supposed to, but I'd like to have dimensions so I can build the shells to align.

Software

Not sure how I'll manage storage for these yet. "q" is the TLD I chose because it's not used and hopefully will never be by virtue of it being a one-letter TLD. I hope we can get IANA to formally recognize one-letter and one-number TLDs for internal/local use.

I'm toying with the idea of using OpenBSD or FreeBSD for this instead of Linux, but I'm not sure the hardware I want to use will be supported (e-ink displays and SDRs).

Gemini services:

q — a directory to the below services, and maybe some others if they're accessible via the solarport access point or VPN.

wikipedia.q — guess what! it's Wikipedia.

stackexchange.q — Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, and similar sites, archived.

dartdocs.q — docs for Dart packages, Dart itself, and Flutter. Not sure how this would be managed yet, and it might become irrelevant too.

Non-Gemini services:

an IRC server, probably hosted at q

ntfy.q — an instance of ntfy

a bulletin board or forum — mostly if I'm hosting this for a community. It may sync with others in the community too, by WiFi or mesh network. Who knows.

a Minecraft/Minetest server (and/or another game. Maybe the game is on a rotation)

a wireless WiFi/WLAN access point by which to access the solarport. It might sometimes be connected to the Internet via wifi or mobile data, and during those times you can maybe also access those services via VPN (Headscale? OpenVPN? Who knows)

a WebSDR, maybe? SDRs get pretty hot from my experience. I'd like to keep this thing's carbon emissions near zero.

The e-ink display

I think I might have some graphs illustrating server load and power consumption, and some system messages like "service down" or "weather alert" which might be denoted with colors (so these might have red, but there might be ones with green or yellow too, like for "service restarted").

I have no idea how to program graphs so I might end up figuring it out but this should not take installing a graphical environment. I might do some shenanigans with SVG and CSS for the layout though.

Shell design ideas

The outer shell will probably be custom 3-D printed. It'll have plenty of vertical space in there which will mostly be used by antennas and the screen, and plenty of horizontal space that should comfortably fit the on-board battery and board. I think there will probably be some kind of fan, not sure how it'll work, but the vents on the back will have a little pattern on them due to another layer of another color being put on top.

I don't think my dad has these colors but I'm thinking to make the main body yellow, the panels unit green, and the patterns/accents purple. The inside structural units will be whatever colors we have left.

I might have an accent USB logo pattern applied to the bottom right of the shell, where the ports will be, and I still don't know what ports will be there but I'm hoping at least two USBs, and maybe an aux port and/or HDMI/DisplayPort. Any ideas for a pattern to put on the other side? Once I get closer to starting the project I might ask my parents, they might have ideas. I almost want to go for a cyberpunk look...

I'm now starting on the shell and the dimensions of it are going to be about 18-20cm squared, by ~12 cm tall, subject to change. I thought it was going to be way bigger. This small bucket design should fit any mITX form factor motherboard out there or any SBC (should fit 2 RPis), although it might take a spaced bracket to make sure it doesn't rattle around in there.

name ideas: Summit Station, Zenith Terminal

Related

Futurism, a gemlog about the future (haven't made it yet)