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’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%
Cool, you should add it to https://caolan.uk/links/servers/
Thanks, its there now!
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
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.
Do you have a guide to replicate? I have a half broken pixel 7 that might work for something like this
Seconded.
Especially if it could be done on a phone with a non functioning screen.
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!
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.
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?
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.
deleted by creator
I have bad experience with self-hosting termux server on a Samsung-Android device. The background process would be terminated after one week of hands off runtime. I tried to rectify this in the power-saving settings to no avail. Still this is really cool:
Your server works for me, it displays:
Battery: 63% DISCHARGING
Temp: 12°C
That’s sick as hell
Thanks! Its a very simple setup.
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!
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.
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.
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.
