Crank Up Your Webserver

destinyX writes: "Lineo an embedded linux company and inventors of uClinux (microcontroller linux) produced an intresting 'batteryless' webserver." A very cool creative re-use! You never know when you'll be out in the desert with nothing but a convenient ethernet cable leading toward an oasis I guess.

Comments

An equally useless application for this...

[Vic Metcalfe]

Hook it up to a water or wind mill, and have it serve a web-cam page of itself running. We should have enough power left to run a quick-cam, shouldn't we?

Wouldn't it be nice if (TM)

[Apuleius]

Your exercise bike came linked to a dynamo, so that you could use it to store up power in an array of rechargeables, so you could then then use a Zener diode setup to bypass the power supplies on some of your appliances (when and only when the batteries were up) and power them with the sweat of your brow? You could have an array of Zeners for each voltage level on your radio or other small appliances, and it wouldn't take too much soldering to hook these up. It would make a really cool demo, especially now that Fornicalia is having rolling blackouts and other states may soon as well.

slow

[austad]

His site is slow, maybe he should crank with the other arm.

Sexually challenged geeks?

[tweder]

Now it seems that those "computer-types" have a reasonable explanation for their right arm being much larger than their left one.

:)

coooooool

[SirSlud]

Finally, we can put all those fired silicon valley geeks back into physical slavery ... powering california's websites by rotating the handle. They'll finally be able to afford a meal and cardboard box again.

Solar Servers

[rkent]

Oh, man. I've been thinking for years that they ought to just cover the land in Arizona with solar-powered server farms and commodity solar "generators." At least along, for example, I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, where the sensitive ecosystem is already ruined (my first site nomination is that ludicrous abandoned amusment park near Eloy). With 300+ days of sun per year, the power supply would be rock solid as long as you had enough deep-cell batteries to get you through the monsoons. And you could probably collect way, way more power than you actually needed over the area of the server building, and actually push some back into the Grid.

It's win-win!

---

Somebody call PETA!

[TrebleJunkie]

In related news, RackSpace has just placed an order for 7.6 million Hamsters.

Ed R.Zahurak

how can this be new?

[tim_maroney]

There have been crank sites all over the Internet for years!

Tim

SetiByHand

[ColGraff]

Imagine putting seti@home on one of these lantern computers, along with a wireless modem and Iridium hookup. You wouldn't even need a display, just crank in order to get a few of those oh-so-crucial work units out for Team Whatever. You could distribute these computers in third-world countries, and have massive computing power from millions of people just cranking these things a few minutes at a time.

No, I am not being serious.