TuesDog

Sunset Website Project

For a while now I have had this idea for a project where a picture of the sunset is taken each day and uploaded to a website for people to view. I want it to be automated for the most part, and solar powered so that it can run outside under it’s own power. The problem is, I don’t know anything about powering things using solar panels and batteries… Until now!

My plan was to use a Raspberry Pi computer powered by a battery that is charged using a solar panel. Each day the battery will store charge from the sun and at sunset it would power on the Raspberry Pi and take a picture of the sunset. Then the picture is sent to a server that then hosts the image on a website for anyone to view.

Problem is, how do you do all that? It would need to be the right amount of power and the right voltage and current to power the pi. It would also need to be housed in a weatherproof box. The climate here goes from 40^o^C in the summer to -40^o^C in the winter (with plenty of ice and snow to boot). I have been attempting to think up solutions to these issues before jumping into the project but have not been too successful so far.

Enter Solar Protocol! This website is hosted by a network of solar powered servers that exist all over the world. Because it is always sunny somewhere the people behind the project are able to host their website consistently using solar power! When requesting the site you are sent to the server with the most battery power, instead of the fastest responding server as would be typical with most other websites.

This AMAZING project has lots of details about how it all works, documentation available to the public, and a full GitHub page with all their code and Google Docs they created to allow other people to build their own solar server and add it to the network. The setup they have created is exactly what I was looking to achieve, minus the camera. So hopefully, if I follow their guidance carefully then I might be able to get my project off the ground and maybe become another node on their network as a happy side-effect! They mentioned users being able to host their own content on their servers too so maybe that is the way to host my sunset image site? I’ll need to do some more research on that I think.

Super exciting stuff, and a massive congratulations and thank you for the Solar Protocol team. They have succeeded in creating a really beautiful project, and lovingly made all of their research available to the public. Why aren’t more people talking about this website and project?!

For more details, here are links to their website, documentation, and GitHub.