This is my solar powered setup. A somewhat old Pixel 6a that fell from a foot and a half (really!?), a 10w Solar setup that was around 20$ on amazon. And an old compost container I have too many of. Ill be giving it a proper 3d printed case when I get a chance (and a host of other changes) but for now this works! Its worth about 40$ in total (the phone is now worth about 21$ on the open market).
Website: https://solar.chrisco.me/
Website was made with a collection of scripts, apache2 (nginx for some reason did not install, errors), and termux. Ill open source the whole setup in a bit. Theres not much to it to be honest.
Hopefully keeping the battery at 80% will help the lifetime of the battery. I may bump it up at some point if it keeps dieing because lack of sunlight. But we shall see.
More info in the link. I couldn’t get Piefed to repost from a GotoSocial link.
I had the idea to use an old phone as a server recently. Phones are pretty energy efficient, so it seems like it’d be a smart way to recycle one. Does anyone know if this is actually a good practical idea for a lightweight personal server, rather than just a novelty? I haven’t heard of anyone doing it before so I’m assuming there’s a reason it isn’t a good idea, but I don’t know what that’d be.
I think the best question to ask first is ‘what kind of server?’
A web server could run a reasonably busy low-tech web2.0 blog site on a phone, I think without breaking a sweat.
Other types of serving (media, especially) would be resource limited) maybe not.
And there is an important difference between ’novelty’ and ‘demo’. Even a novelty server can demonstrate new ways to think about tech. Maybe an author could host their book launch on such a setup, serving only a single file and showing that we don’t exactly need to involve Amazon. That’s where my head goes when thinking about these efforts.
First thought is you likely can give it Ethernet with a usb c dongle.
Oh yeah that would 100% speed it up. Its about 200/300 ms delay on wifi.
That sounds like way too much, unless you have a really congested network or interference in the area. Should be able to get it at least 10x faster, unless you’re taking the web server page load time into account in your latency numbers and not just the network.
Depending on the dongle, that would increase power consumption. I think that is difficult in the current state, seeing that there is not much power to spare at the moment.
What makes you think it would consume more power than the WiFi radio currently does?
Cool, you should add it to https://caolan.uk/links/servers/
Oh neat! Yeah ill do it when I get a chance.
EDIT: Looks like quite a few of those sites are defunct.
nice! i’d recommend keeping the battery a bit lower tho, and perhaps lower charging currency/voltage.
i believe it’s also possible to run proper linux on this phone btw
Which Linux distro would work on a phone? I have an old zenfone 8 lying around.
postmarketOS, mobian, etc… these are ‘real’ linux distros that work without the android parts. as your device doesn’t have a (near-)mainline kernel port i believe you can boot postmarketOS with the stock downstream kernel, though many peripherals won’t function.
halium based distros like ubports and droidian use a part of the android userspace to make those peripherals work, which can be better if mainline is not possible.
I’ve been wanting to do exactly this for a long time. Is there any documentation on how to set it up?
Has anyone figured out how to make android use a static IPv6 address? If I have to run a reverse proxy on a real PC, I may as well just host the website from that PC.
Is there a specific reason you strictly need static ipv6?
Android changes its IPv6 address daily. That makes it kinda hard to host anything on it. SLAAC would be fine too if it was a stable address.
Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?
The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.
That hasn’t stopped the addresses from changing on any of the devices I’ve tried it on.
If you’re using SLAAC for auto IP assignment, then the resulting EUI-64-based address would be essentially static, based on the premise that your MAC address and local subnet prefix don’t change. Privacy extensions night get in the way, as well as Android’s randomized MAC feature, but those are adjustable.
I’m curious as to how big of a load you’ve put on the system, so far. Is it just the site? What’s the code for charging? Do you have it set to discharge to 30% then charge, or just charge to 80% whenever it’s discharged some arbitrary amount? Sorry for the questions, I’m incredibly fascinated by this project!
I’d dare say the easier method, from memory the p6 should have a charge limit in the stock firmware.
I’ve not an old Samsung s10+ kicking around with corrupted firmware, should really take a look at it and see if it can be up and running again. Not that I need more cores, ram, cameras or any additions to my equipment but just because.
It fassinates me that consumer hardware, and low power at that goes wasted so often. So many small form factor devices such as phones, with built in ups aren’t being leveraged. But I guess that comes down to proprietary binary blobs and developer work on a per device basis.
I might have to investigate what platforms mobile nixos supports and see if it’s cheap enough to dabble with.
I think like 5% at max? Apache2 + straight HTML is very low on cpu memory. Its probably overkill honestly.
Its auto set yp go to 80% petminantly as the highest charge. And android itself takes care of the heavy lifting when it comes to battery optimization.
Super cool project. I visited, and I hope you keep building the site stats views out. So many people are curious about self hosting and solar, if you just kept it as a demo that shows how the system holds up over longer term, well I know I would appreciate occasional reminders to check it out. It may inspire others to try similar things.
And I would have happily signed any digital wall you implemented.
I just added a “Visitor” section to it. Its directly looking at logs.
I saw a bot rampage the site a bit ago which was funny to see. It was trying to find books (?). No idea what that was about. Oh well site is still up.
From the power draw, it looks like lemmy federation got hold of it around 16:30. As of 17:20, it’s still holding up.
I understand the Mastodon federation system can be very DDOS-ey on web sites, if you’re tempted to post it there.
Cool project.
I’ll assume it’s cool, but currently hugged to death for me. Just wanted to point out batteries are replaceable even if glued, fixed my GrapheneOS Pixel7 after it killed itself (spicy pillow) charging in heat in a warmer country. iFixit kit + video worked, then got a Chargie which lets you set a temperature above which it will not charge (33C for me, only charges at night in summer). Probably relevant in your case.
With chargie you could keep the battery hovering around 50%
Do you know about LowTech Magazine’s guide to host super efficient webserver with optional image dithering?
That website was the first thing I thought about when I saw the post. Great content too!
This is really awesome.
What OS did you flash on that Pixel6 to get it working? Or are you using a linux vm on an android phone?
Generic android with termux.
Whatever you do, keep us posted!, this reusing old technology is really interesting
Will do! I still need to do an actual writeup. Maybe even host it on the site.
That is fricking sick dude!
That’s sick as hell
Thanks! Its a very simple setup.
