Design
This website is a tool to communicate and share our values and ideas, but also an ongoing project to imagine sustainable futures, where individuals, collectives and institutions manage their digital data in a more decentralised and sustainable way.
It is a reflection about the energy consumption of our everyday actions, and our everyday decisions on the digital world that, although comfortable for us, have an impact on the planet and on communities in other parts of the world.
A solar-powered website is also a reflection about technology, about the irresponsible trends that arise every now and then, and about thinking what is truly important and necessary.
Designing a solar website means avoiding fancy and heavy software libraries, high definition pictures and non-essential features. As light as possible. These constraints, far from limiting, are the spark that ignites our creativity and inspires us to look back to the origins of the internet when computer memory and processing power were smaller.
Our website is a symbol of our values, a tool and a statement.
Technology
This v.1 of our website is not yet completely solar powered. But its design and hardware setup go towards that goal. According to prior references of similar projects, the website should be hosted on a low powered device. In our case that device is an old Raspberry Pi B+.
The operating system that runs on this device is a Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy 32-bit) and inside there is a web server software lighttpd that serves pure static website.
Rapsberry Pi hardware runs on 5V 220mA, or about 0.9W. It is connected to a temporary solar power bank that needs to be charged during at nights.
A more definitive version of the solar website, the v.2 is on its way.
.-''''-.
_______ _______ ,' <_,-.`.
| | || | | ____ 01 /) ,--,_>\_\
|___|___||___|___| | ยบ| 1 0 |' ( \_ |
| | || | | | __ | 10101 |_ `-. / |
|___|___||___|___| __| | 01 \`-. ; _(`/
| | || | | _ _/ | __ |10 1 `.( \/ ,'
|___|___||___|___|\_/ \_/ |____| 1001 `-....-'
References
Solar-powered webistes examples
- LOW TECH MAGAZINE
- solar-powered webiste of Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal.
- Solar Hosted Portfolio. Scott.ee
Other similar examples