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.
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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.
Meanwhile, I’m using Pixel 3a for my main phone (for quite a few years now) and consider it a relatively up-to-date phone.
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!
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 work. But the phone should be able to host quite a bit more, as it is actually quite fast.
Im not sure I want to host more on the phone (yet?). Its a nice novelty but I have other self hosted platforms that are much more robust. This is more of a “can I do it” kind of project. Your seeing my free time right now.
Thanks for the comment!
But can you do it more
First thought is you likely can give it Ethernet with a usb c dongle.
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?
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.
Its the entire request. Its definitely not the software, that takes > 20 ms if its direct connected via Ethernet usbc. You are entirely correct, it can be much faster like my other services are.
Its wifi 2.4 across multiple walls. Im frankly surprised its only 200+ ms delay with the amount of signals in the area.
That’s sick as hell
Thanks! Its a very simple setup.
Do you have a guide to replicate? I have a half broken pixel 7 that might work for something like this
I’ve been wanting to do exactly this for a long time. Is there any documentation on how to set it up?
Very cool, but would suggest replacing the 6A some time – read up on its battery problems
Yes send it back to Google and get 100USD for it
The battery has already been replaced.
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.
Thanks! Yeah its right around the time the sun went away. Its cloudy where I’m at today.
I cannot keep track which models have issues but isn’t the 6a one of those with battery bloat issues? Might remember wrong. Definitley a cool project! Is the phone not getting super hot in that plastic box?
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 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.
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.
