Solar Powered Wi-Fi

inkslinger77 writes "A small US startup has announced it has created a system for running Wi-Fi routers in remote places using only the power of the sun. Among the first round of products from Solis Energy is the Solar Power Plant, touted as being capable of supplying 12, 24 and 48 Volts DC for use in stand-alone applications such as surveillance cameras and outdoor Wi-Fi."

Comments

Bright idea

[LiquidCoooled]

Its always illuminating to see developers take a lateral step towards problems.

Here in the UK we use the tiny amount of light to power calculators but I think you would need a panel at least 3km square.

Re:Bright idea

[hauntingthunder]

this is news ? they have been doing this for ages loads of equipment thats installed along side roads have been using solar and windpower for years in the uk

Re:Bright idea

[Stooshie]

Solar panels don't need high temperatures/direct sunlight to work, they just need light and they work perfectly well in the UK.

Re:Bright idea

[mwvdlee]

So.... how were they planning to connect the wireless routers? Using another wireless router that is connected to yet another wireless router that connects to... well, you get the drill.

Re:Bright idea

[wvmarle]

You are talking about a mesh network. Should go fine. Maybe add a directional aerial to connect to it's peers over slightly longer distances, saves a 100% overlapping network.

Re:Bright idea

[Eivind]

Yeah. Why not ? A mesh-network is ideal in many parts of the world with poor infrastructure. Sure, the mesh needs to connect to the internet at *some* point, if internet-access is desired, but it's sufficient for a small portion of the nodes in the mesh to have internet-connection that can then be shared with the others.

Re:Bright idea

[The Master Control P]

Dye-Sensitized solar cells will solve that; They have no PN junction and thus no recombination problem at lower light levels.

Re:Bright idea

[saigon_from_europe]

We tried to do this in southern England. Worked great till October. Then we had to send our technician every couple of days to replace the accumulator.

Strange thing that accumulator seemed to be 100% full all the time during the summer, so we thought that it would be able to survive at least the fall if not the winter.

Re:Bright idea

[Soruk]

Nothing to stop them use this or something similar to power point-to-point microwave links to provide uplinks for the wi-fi access points.

Re:Bright idea

[Soruk]

That just sounds like the solar panel (and perhaps the accumulator) were hopelessly underspecified. Assuming we're talking the good old lead acid battery, those things really do not take kindly to being run down completely.

Re:Bright idea

[hostyle]

That was me! I've been stealing your accumulators, replacing them with faulty ones - and will use them to take over the sun!

Re:Bright idea

[nmg196]

> Solar panels don't need high temperatures/direct sunlight to work
> they just need light and they work perfectly well in the UK.

No they don't. They can *just* provide enough power to power a calculator if you're sat near a window. In the UK, photo-voltaic solar panels are almost never used for anything commercial because it just doesn't lack of direct sunlight we have over the winter months. If you go to sunny countries, you'll see solar panels powering phone masts, traffic flow monitors, road sign lighting and even traffic lights.

Re:Bright idea

[Tony Hoyle]

Solar powered calculators work perfectly well indoors in the UK - the ambient light is enough to power them. I have one sat on my desk here..

PV cells are used for lots of stuff in the UK including some of the the things you list above.

Re:Bright idea

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Here in the UK we use the tiny amount of light to power calculators but I think you would need a panel at least 3km square.

Not at all- ThinkGeek has a $99, 216 cm^2 panel that can be used to recharge your cell phone while using it; your average Wifi router doesn't use more than that. The next thing we need is for Cisco to come out with a mesh router- A Wifi Router that takes a standard 5v or 12v input, but has two radios- a Mesh Mode radio and an Infrastructure Mode radio, so that you can put a forest of Wifi routers and poles in a public place, providing a cloud of coverage with no other wiring.

Re:Bright idea

[BillyBob23]

There is a company called MikroTik(mikrotik.com) that produces incredible long/short range 802.11 equipment, and they have been using solar powered stuff for quite some time(I think it might be third party, but the community has been embracing it for a while). If any of you are looking for some cheap and very powerful linux platform wifi solutions, I suggest you give them a good hard look as my expierence with them has been bliss.

Re:Bright idea

[Stooshie]

I have an uncle who built his own solar panels (basically just lots of thin water pipes under glass) on his roof to heat the water for the house, and the water actually got too hot at times. (and we are in Scotland).

Re:Bright idea

[niceone]

Don't worry, they are working on a rain powered version for the UK.

Re:Bright idea

[ppc_digger]

Here, in Israel, about 95% of all houses have such systems, as they are required by law.

Re:Bright idea

[davewbrandt]

I have my own home built system powering part of my wifi system. It has been running happily for months on a 80 watt panel. I built the whole system for less than $1000 usd. I used parts sourced from a local vendor and Staros on a wrap board.

Re:Bright idea

[AigariusDebian]

Can confirm this - there is a bunch of long range links powered by Mikrotik routers where retransmitters are basically a 10m pole with a router, two antennas, solar panel and an accumulator on top. As the Mikrotik RouterBoard design draws 5 W of power at full load, the accumulator can hold for a week without the solar panel. I am told that some of these devices are working for around 5 years now without any maintenance. Having no moving parts helps a lot in a sandy dessert situation these things are used at.

Covering up...

[ilovegeorgebush]

for use in stand-alone applications such as surveillance cameras and outdoor Wi-Fi

Perhaps this is a whole new reason for bank robbers to throw their masks over the cameras...

Re:Covering up...

[ZeroFactorial]

Forget bank robbers - now the little hacker kid next door, in addition to stealing your bandwidth, can actually just steal your router right off your rooftop.

Struggling...

[Alioth]

I'm struggling to see what's newsworthy or innovative about what will essentially be a silicon solar cell, battery, and DC-DC converter. I've had a similar home-made system on my shed roof for a while now. No doubt it'll come with a confetti like stream of patents :/

Re:Struggling...

[Loligo]

My previous response got lost somewhere, so I'll try again:

I agree. I can attach a solar cell to a UPS and a $50 Netgear WAP.

Where's MY check?

  -l

Re:WTFA?

[Eddi3]

I hope that was some sort of joke, but in case it wasn't, here you go:

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;20982 2754;fp;16;fpid;1

Been around a while....

[butlerdi]

There have been several such projects such as the MIT http://www.green-wifi.org/ which is itself beholding to the MIT Roofnet project http://www.comclub.org/roofnet/.

Simpleton

[Propaganda13]

I'm struggling to see what's newsworthy or innovative about what will essentially be a silicon solar cell, battery, and DC-DC converter.

AND WIFI!!!
or didn't you get that part?

And this is 'news'?

[chris_sawtell]

Here's a link for an historical perspective.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/144812 1

Note 2002, FIVE years ago.

Re:Obvious

[Eddi3]

1. Attach a Solar Cell to a battery.
2. Attach the battery to a wireless router.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!

I'm sure it's one of those.

Nothing really. They just do it all for you.

[Colin Smith]

It's just a set of products. Nifty, but not revolutionary, well to those with a reliable electricity supply anyway. The nice thing is you can plonk it down literally anywhere in the world.

solar powered hovering wireless routers

[egumtow]

The issue of power has always been a problem for wireless technology. Even though the signal can, in theory, go anywhere, in practice the lack of available - or affordable - power can often stymie installation.

I disagree.

At least for outdoor municipal wifi, the routers are usually mounted on utility poles. There's no shortage of cheap power on utility poles!

You can make the argument that it might not be mounted on a utility pole. Like somewhere indoors. But then that renders the solar aspect pretty useless.

What we really need are solar powered wireless wifi routers that can autonomously position and hover themselves at a fixed location. Now that'd be cool, and useful.

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[IBBoard]

And then you'd just get bored kids trying to shoot it down as target practice just because it hovers.

It would be cool to see it hover, but given the power needed to make it actually hover then I think the solar energy they'll be getting at the moment is probably best used on the WiFi for now.

The idea is good, but it's not as if it'd actually work for a whole day solid here in the UK for a good proportion of the year!

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[salec]

Solar-powered hovering device? No problem... solar heated hot-air baloon! (there is also a prior art out there, in some kids' TV show)

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[salec]

Err... I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_balloon

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[dbIII]

Nice joke - but some people live outside of cities so a wireless router that does not have to connect to mains is useful for them. Temporary situations like sporting events would be other uses.

The funny think is I saw a solar powered microwave repeater over a decade ago - the difference here I think is that they are talking about a consumer product. It would be nice to have freely accessable wireless routers on the sides of major highways in the middle of nowhere - we could call them belltrees if you want an obscure SF reference.

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[IBBoard]

I'd have thought they might have had a problem with floating off. Either that or you tether them to something, at which point people will pull it in by the tether or else you're tethering it to something tall like a utility post, which you might as well have stuck it on top of in the first place ;)

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[Burrfoot]

> At least for outdoor municipal wifi, the routers are usually mounted on utility poles. There's no shortage of cheap power on utility poles!

You would think so, would you. However as they just discovered here in St. Louis, they only turn the power on to the street lights at night! D'Oh. RTFA here

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[FooAtWFU]

What we really need are solar powered wireless wifi routers that can autonomously position and hover themselves at a fixed location. Now that'd be cool, and useful.

I recall an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal some months ago about how some telecom/television/something companies were looking into high-altitude blimps as an alternative to satellites. They'd be equipped with the usual satellite stuff, have a little fuel on board to adjust for drifting (there isn't too much way up there), and when it's time to upgrade or replace them, you can fly another one up to take its place.

But that's not solar, and certainly not regular 802.11-etc wifi. I mean, guess they could add a few panels, but they probably need to be concerned about weight et cetera.

Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers

[salec]

Well, the lift is there, at least during daytime... now, for steering and staying in place strap additional solar panels and DC motors with propellers, or some kind of thermo-solar pulsejets (I don't know if such things exist already but I have some vague idea that it is doable...).

application

[polar red]

It's a great idea for remote small communities. It makes the world - again - much smaller.

Exactly (time investment)

[choseph]

And that is the key -- it is a pre-built set of products.

I could also create something for my shed if i want to look into manufacturers for quality and price, choose the individual components, ensure I knew how they all went together (safely), and mount it on the shed. Just like I don't have the time or interest in building computers from scratch anymore, I don't have the interest in investing all this time into building a custom solution. If they can give a warantee that covers their whole package, they can test the configurations and crazy outdoor conditions, and they can build thousands of them in the time it takes me to assemble one, then super. They aren't stopping you from creating your own custom product for your shed.

I wish someone would make some entry level package like this for homes -- a solar cell, simple cables (as easy as a power cord you can plug into each side), and a battery. Then give me some ways to go battery-out to random appliances and I think it would be a good way to let people try solar without the 10K+ investment and installation knowledge. Even if I only get enough juice to charge my laptop, it is at least a way to get started/interested.

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[dintech]

Also I can imagine these being chained up to form a larger network of routers and gateways. I wonder exactly how big a network like that could get?

This could be a cheap way to build a campus wide or even city wide network.

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[sumdumass]

I don't think there will ever be a turn key consumer level solar system for regular consumers. For one, the voltages are still strong enough to cause damage to you or your home so there is a need for a competent home owner or an electrician. Two, running the DC supplies means that a lot of appliances would need to be swapped out from Ac to DC or even more complexed would be running on both. Then you have the problem of inverters that waisted a lot of energy converting to AC in order for most devices to convert back to DC.

Put all that together in some shape or form and you end up with something that isn't near as efficient as a custom designed setup professionally installed. I'm thinking the cost of the installation would be less then the decreased efficiency and likely turn the cost up. The cost is already more expensive in most/some cases then regular AC from the power company. In some markets you can make a savings, But I don't think it is anything to brag about.

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[dbIII]

Fifty years ago my parents ran their house on 12 volts DC. It's never been a difficult problem to solve - there are a wide variety of appliances designed for that. Companies that sell appliances to fit into ship, boats, trucks and caravans can give you the answer. You don't really think refridgerated trucks run on 240 Volts do you? As for computers, swap out the power supply or the transformer brick for a laptop - no big deal since you don't need more than 12 volts.

The two problems are cost for the different appliances and having enough current to run what you need. An anecdote from a 20 year old solar village in Australia from a kid that grew up there was they could do the washing or watch TV but not both at once. Easy to solve but the extra money was not worth it for a little extra convenience.

Back to the topic - a self powered router on a stake you can hammer in anywhere could be very useful. There's a lot of places where you have to depend on very slow data transmision via GPRS, CDMA or whatever using a phone as a modem and getting charged a fortune for the privelege.

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[dbIII]

OK - so you need more than 12 volts for some laptops (19 volts - nasty non standard expensive things to get that users alway lose just when they need them for a trip - I hates them precioussss).

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[Gordonjcp]

You don't really think refridgerated trucks run on 240 Volts do you?

They do when they're on "ground power". Most of the time when they're mobile, a small diesel engine drives the compressor.

Very very small units on refridgerated vans can run off 12V, but they typically can only cool to fridge temperatures (0C-4C) rather than freezer temperatures (-18C).

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[broggyr]

Is that warranty guaranteed?

Re:Exactly (time investment)

[sumdumass]

Well, you hit the nail on one of the problems with going AC. Buying all new appliances, rewiring the house for the 12 volts which probably should be 48 volts (it is just easier to work with), and most people aren't willing to do one thing or the other because they are used to doing everything at once.

BTW, the refrigerated trucks, motor home air units, and all that use diesel or gas motors to power them for the most part. Some of the units have inverters and the ability to run off 12 volts for short periods of time but most of them have plug in places where you hook to a generator or electric pole. And even the ones running from 12 or 24 volts use an engine to charge the batteries.

But your not thinking about all the work and costs involved with getting the DC wiring installed to the new home, replacing the appliances and all that too. It would be much easier to just use a inverter and bring the power in as AC which looses some efficiency.

New homes could have it already built in to save some expenses but think about how many markets that would actually please? The extra 10 thousand for installation would be a drop in the hat for someone willing to already spend 50k "more" on a house that is solar ready with panels and all. And the Installation cost isn't really being avoided, it is just replacing some of the normal construction costs. Your still using professionals to install it. So while you should see a savings, it isn't a saving in the professional installation. It would be in the lack of other stuff being done at the same time. (IE running new wires and paching drywall compared to running wires before the drywall was even covering the wall and stuff like that. And the considerations like proper wiring sizes, battery locations to avoid fires or poisonous gases as well as easy replacement are all already taken into account.

It would be a specialty or niche market in the first place and then narrowed to an even smaller market which usually means that cost is up which would mean that you could probably buy power from the local provider cheaper then you could make. But, If you think otherwise, I suggest putting package ideas together, costing them out and seeing if a bank would be interested enough in taking your idea and plans to venture capitalists for financing. I mean there always is the possibility that it could make money, just not the lighting cigars with 100 dollar bills stinking rich money which stops existing people from investing in some markets. And with a product already established and the ground floor open, when the prices do fall, your likely to see an increase in sales for an increase in profit. I don't know how you could avoid liability though. When someone takes your Turn Key product and wires it wrongly which allows the three year old in the house (or someone else) to get electrocuted or starts a fire. Most companies get by this by claiming their products are designed for professional installation only and mark it that way one the box. You also have local zoning ordinances to worry about and all that stuff too.

Back to the topic - a self powered router on a stake you can hammer in anywhere could be very useful. There's a lot of places where you have to depend on very slow data transmision via GPRS, CDMA or whatever using a phone as a modem and getting charged a fortune for the privelege.

Sure. And a little self contained unit that is reliable that you can get off the shelf would be great. I agree with you very much. I am assuming that some of the wireless routers would be of a commercial nature which could mean that the reliance on existing towers might be avoided. A local ISP offered wireless broadband access and it cost him something like $30 per customer connecting to the radios plus a flat rate to be on the tower per month. Think about what that does to the costs.

that's incredible news

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks so much for posting it.

This is old old old

[Anonymous Coward]

We have been doing this in ham radio for better than 20 years! There are several repeaters in the porltand area that run only on wind and solar, one entire repeater network (AB7F) runs only on wind and solar. Even more impressive when you consider the fact the transmit power can range from 20 to 100watts. They also usually have computers and RF based internet links at these sites to provide IRLP access, which is used to connect repeaters via voip. If anyone thinks this technology is new, and cutting edge, they should have the shit slapped out of them!

Ben 'Polyhead' Smith
KE7GAL

Re:This is old old old

[BTremblay]

We have been doing this in ham radio for better than 20 years!
Ahh, ham radio. Nearly as modern as sending your aeromail letter to the Prussian Consulate in Siam via the 4:30 autogyro.

But not to my living room...

[wvmarle]

City-wide or country-wide WiFi sounds very cool to me. But - walls are a serious problem for WiFi. This in contrast to GSM signals, however in the concrete jungle called Hong Kong (with like 6 or 8 networks), even GSM is not everywhere available, particularly indoors.

I've wireless at home. It has a problem sometimes penetrating the two concrete walls between my living room (where the access point is) and my bedroom (where I sometimes use my laptop as well). I live on the 16th floor, a wireless access point on the ground level will never reach my living room. The penetration is too poor, and the distance is too long. So for city-wide WiFi, are there better solutions available?

In the countryside the problems are of course different - mountains are in the way and distances are often huge. Yet GSM networks are already fully covering even sparsely populated countries like Sweden and Norway. Is there a way do do so for WiFi without setting up repeaters every 500m? Is there a way to penetrate walls like GSM signals do?

The technology is nice, I love it. But at this moment for wireless networking on the go I will continue to use my mobile phone, over GPRS (yes we have UMTS available but that is mighty expensive, not worth it for me). It ain't fast, but it is virtually everywhere available, and has no problem keeping a connection when sitting in the train (try that with WiFi that is not in the train itself).

All and all I wonder, why not use the existing GSM networks? Most developed countries have UTMS available everywhere (USA is a developing country when it comes to digital technology, sad as it may be). Isn't that much more convenient, and cost efficient to use than a newly built WiFi network? There are more and more unlimited wireless plans (in Hong Kong you pay about US$80-100 per month for unlimited UTMS, add say US$200 a month for unlimited UTMS/GPRS roaming in mainland China). It's there, it's ready, and it's getting cheaper fast.

Re:But not to my living room...

[Archimonde]

I know it is a bit OT, but in my experience penetration of wifi signals is pathetic. I have wrt54g some time now and I had problem connecting to it from my laptop just three walls/rooms away (same house, thick walls though). After a while I decided to have a computer in the house opposite to the house mentioned previously. It is around 50m distance and 2 walls (wireless router is behind the window). Not a chance. I then had to drill a hole in the wall, put the pc's antenna outside and then eventually had a weak signal even though the router and pc's antenna were in LOS. It was working ok for a few weeks and in that time I certainly noticed degradation of signal and consequently the speed. After a week or so, I completely lost the signal. I realized it was some leaves (wtf?!) from a tree blocking the LOS. I had enough of it then, and decided to spend 10euro and stretch a cat5 cable. It works amazingly now. High speed, reliability, no 1-minute ping spikes (especially in vista, I don't use it no more though), or additional drivers.

I just have a feeling from my humble experience that wifi is overrated concerning real-world range.

Re:But not to my living room...

[digitalchinky]

Don't be misled by GSM, it suffers from the very same problems as WiFi, not quite as bad depending upon the frequency the phone wants to use at any given moment. The reason it works so well is simply because they install their antennas directly inside buildings, subways, and just about every walkway that has high enough traffic to earn the carriers extra money. Take a look on the ceiling of just about every shopping center in Hong Kong and you'll see small domed antenna with telco logo's. This is for GSM/3G etc. I live up on the 30th-ish floor of a city building, use a couple of directional yagi antenna for *ahem* free wifi. On any given day I have over 200 AP's to chose from. The vast majority of these are open. The reason you probably don't get anything on the ground is simply because the radio environment is too noisy. Invest in a parabolic dish and that problem will go away.

GSM base stations transmit with much greater power than wifi, but still don't penetrate walls so good either.

Re:But not to my living room...

[The Master Control P]

About the tree leaves: The 2.4Ghz wifi signal is right in one of water's absorbtion bands, so if the leaves weren't dessicated I guess your WiFi was very gently microwaving them.

Anyway, I had the same experience with WiFi. My room was one wall away from the router, about 20 feet. 70-80% signal, and roughly 10mbps actual throughput (measured by scp of large files). We tried to set up a computer on the other side of the house. It got either the speed of cheap cable or just enough signal to stall out but still claim it was connected. I'm on 100mbps ethernet, other machine's still out of luck...

Re:But not to my living room...

[Inda]

And yet I get free wi-fi in my house with no problems.

My two next-door neighbours do not even own a computer.

Five doors away has wi-fi - I helped set it up - and I can see that on my Wii. Minimum of five walls. (shame it's password protected).

Someone around here has an access point and it must travel through a minimum of two walls, unless they have it mounted outside.

*shrugs*

Re:But not to my living room...

[div_2n]

There are four things going for cell signals that give them a big leg up on wifi:

1) The frequencies for cell signals are much lower in frequency giving them a better penetration of buildings and other objects
2) The equipment is, as I understand it, more powerful
3) The antennas are larger and directional
4) The antennas tend to be mounted higher and therefore cover more ground

Now, you could mount directional antennas for wifi on tall towers or buildings to help level the playing field for 3 and 4. You can also get amplifiers to help deal with 2, but amplification is generally bad since it amplifies noise as well. There are some pretty powerful wifi transmitters these days, so they might help. The laws of physics just won't allow you to overcome the first one.

And therein lies the problem of why wifi just isn't a great solution for trying to create a city-wide wifi network from the outside-in. You could try to put nodes on the inside of a building and blanket it with signal, but that adds quite a bit of cost and complexity to a project.

Re:But not to my living room...

[Anti_Climax]

Just remember that all wireless access points are not created equally. The Linksys routers that can run DD-WRT and similar are typically locked under 100mW with their stock firmware and can be boosted to 270mW or so once that's gone.

If you're running DSL I'd recommend a 2Wire gateway (1800HG, 1701HG) from eBay, since you can boost the output to 400mW and it has a 3 antenna configuration (pre-mimo) to minimize throughput losses from switching antenna states.

Re:But not to my living room...

[khallow]

You can get about ten to twenty miles line of sight (LOS) with good antennas. In your case, I think you need better antennas, then even a tree won't block enough signal to cause trouble. To give you an idea, a couple of friends and I were able to get about five miles wifi LOS with antennas made from soup cans of appropriate dimensions. We did have troubles with trees obviously. But a lot of the time we were able to get signal.

Re:But not to my living room...

[Archimonde]

True enough. Both antennas are omni-directional. I was looking on the web to make an antenna but I just couldn't find a good guide. Some of them were too technical, some of them were too simple (lacking information). Dunno, maybe I just were just looking on the wrong places. I did consider buying a directional antenna, but after some researching I found them to be absurdly expensive unfortunately. Then I were just pissed off and bought 50m of cable. One of my better investments in life;) Saved a lot of nerves.

Before I got into the wifi "world" (that was around 6 months ago) I considered that wifi is really mature/old enough to be widely used (or I'm just reading /. too much;). But with that los/range problems, relatively expensive hardware, problematic Windows support I just got a feeling that wifi is years behind good old lan cable connection unfortunately=S Cable "just works(tm)". Lets just wait and see what n standard will bring better to the the wlans.

Re:But not to my living room...

[zippthorne]

Interesting, but then you no longer have an FCC* type-accepted device, non? So you need to apply for a license, or find rules that allow you to use experimental devices without license at the power level you've specified.

*or whatever regulatory agency operates in your country.

Re:Internet Connection

[digitalchinky]

Not strictly, the access point could linked using its own transmitter to another router that does provide internet. I do this at home using 3rd party software on a few different linksys routers. It affects throughput a little, but not so significantly that it matters for just a few users. Commercial WiFi gear is far more versatile, the technology already exists to do this on a much larger scale.

Slashdotted?

[6Yankee]

TFA is taking an age to load. Either it's slashdotted, or the sun went in...

Re:Slashdotted?

[ebolaZaireRules]

nah - DOS attack. I'm stading in front of it.

Re:Slashdotted?

[6Yankee]

Ah, the old Denial of Sunlight thing... of course...

Re:Obvious

[sumdumass]

I guess somewhere in there should be the ability for me to buy it off the shelf or with relative ease pre-assembled and actually use it. Something that I don't think was available before this. I might be wrong though.

yikes!

[ardor]

What? They run on solar power? And its getting dark? Oh boy, I hope I have enough time left to finish this commen^%$#^%!.+^&[NO CARRIER]

Depends on the kit and the layout

[fantomas]

Depends on the kit and the layout - you can get 10 miles no problem with 5.Ghz kit and there are projects reaching over that in Nepal / India with 2.4Ghz kit. Plus depends on what's in the middle - if you're hopping from small community to small community then they might want to pick up some of the costs. Point taken about reduction in bandwidth due to setting up a mesh network but again depends on purpose - is it for email/ web browsing or streaming video/ playing games which need tiny lag?

Unwirer, anyone?

[The Master Control P]

Unwirer - The mini-sized mobile wifi devices described in it were the first thing I thought of when I read this story. Personally, I think it's an absolutely *fantastic* idea. Slap solar panel, battery, regulator, and WiFi in ad-hoc mode together, liberally slather with silicone sealant, and attach to roof of buildings!

But the idea of putting a solar power unit and radio together isn't new - so why is this news?

Now there's an idea

[Ant P.]

(Not my idea, mind you)

Get a few hundred of these, sprinkle them around town, set them to autoconnect to open APs with a certain SSID and you get free volunteer-run Wi-fi for everyone. Provided enough people change their SSID when you ask them.

Anonymous reflectors

[Chapter80]

One day, very soon, it will become economical to buy a solar-powered wi-fi router, with a built-in software chip (think bit-torrent), and drop it on the ground near Starbucks (or some other open Wi-fi).

This clever, patent-pending device will act as a distributor/reflector of music and warez (does anyone use that term anymore), and will add to the misery of the mafIAA.

I can just see hoards of people willing to go spend $69 to buy one of these, and drop it into a remote location... the same people who aren't willing to license all their music.

What do you think?

(PS I'm kidding on the patent pending... you want to take this idea and run with it, go for it! I have 5000 more, that are just as bad!)

Only the power...

[kaleco]

"using only the power of the sun"

Yeah, only the power of the sun. It's such a great power source we should manufacture more.

Re:Only the power...

[slashname3]

This is a great solution, until the sun goes down.

Now there is going to be no chance for a programmer to be exposed to the Sun. They won't be able to go outside until it gets dark and the network access is down...

Cheap, low power mesh network

[Taxman415a]

Instead of trying to churn out 48 Volts which is serious overkill to run a Wifi router, it seems to make more sense to engineer it for lower power. Slashdotters may remember the articles announcing Meraki's stuff. They built a cheap, low power autoconfiguring mesh network Wifi router. The indoor one is $50 and the outdoor is $100. They're bringing a solar product out as well, but apparently it's not ready for sale yet. Oh, and did I mention they run linux? Of course, any solar contractor could hook up a panel, inverter, and battery set to run one off solar now. The difference is the pre-engineered solution has the potential to be cheap.

THIS IS WHAT I NEED

[Anonymous Coward]

This is EXACTLY what I NEED!!...A solar powered router! I have a terrible World of Warcraft addiction. This invention would limit my time online to just daylight hours! Then, maybe I can have a night life! There are more important things in life than "trying to get my mage to level 70"!

I've often thought about doing this small-scale

[Paulrothrock]

One thing I noticed about all my LAN widgets (modem, router, Vonage box and Slingbox) is that they run on 12V DC. Since most solar panels output 12V DC that is used to charge 12V storage batteries, shouldn't it be relatively easy to get that hooked up? You wouldn't even need an inverter, just connect the 12V DC power source to the equipment.

If anybody's done this, please let me know.

Re:I've often thought about doing this small-scale

[silas_moeckel]

You can just wire them up but a cheap charging controller will keep the battery in shape longer. I did something similar with a 12 supply from ac mains to make an effective UPS for my cable modem, AP and voip adapter stack since I wanted phone when the power went out and the cheap UPS's did not have the runtime I was looking for. I have about 2 amps of draw and a 100amp hour battery so I'm good for a couple days.

Re:I've often thought about doing this small-scale

[Soruk]

You can extend this idea by using it to charge your portable gadgets too, using car charger adapters. I have a relatively small panel (15W) and suitable battery, and I can't remember the last time any of my portable gadgets (laptop aside) have seen mains electricity.

Meraki

[aunitt]

This looks a similar idea to the solar wifi mesh box thingy that Meraki are doing.

They are a startup, partly funded by Google, that are offering free wifi in San Francisco and doing some very neat things with simple to setup wifi meshes.

wow - already did it

[thorkyl]

I did this two years ago.
My 80 ft tower in my backyard has a 3 sf solar panel on
it providing power for my WiFi antenna. Then a smaller 2 sf panel
providing the point to point from the tower to my house.

We've had this for Years

[moylek]

I'm surprised to heat this as "news". We've had a functional solar-powered mesh at McMaster University for years, the product of a research lab: http://owl.mcmaster.ca/~todd/SolarMESH/ Although, even then, I'm surprised to find that this is worth a "research lab" ... it seems like a pretty obvious idea requiring things you can buy at Radio Shack.

Re:We've had this for Years

[solakov]

Hah! I was waiting to see if anyone would mention Dr Todd's solar mesh project at McMaster! It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. It's definately a "research project" if they are workign on creating new power saving methodologies, including real-time handoffs of solar/battery supplies (take a look through the publications section). I do agree though that you could build a pretty functional unit with just standard off-the-shelf products.

-- ECE 06 :)

Not news -- just effective marketing....

[CodeShark]

Boil the article to it's essence and you get "Hey techno geeks!! If you hook up our big honkin' solar panel to our battery, plop our inverter and nearby, plug in a 'net hookup and a Wifi router, you got a great way to do a rural or remote WIFI point."

Of course that leaves out the fact that only about 15% of rural America has broadband access to begin with. Or that even if you have broadband nearby and you get the WIFI router set up, you still have to over-pay a telco or cable company, and if your WIFI point uses more than a bit of bandwidth you get a hugely increased bill or cut off altogether....

Where something like this really fits is "Yo! small municipalities. [or even 3rd world areas] Instead of opening your community to 'Net exploitation, try this: we will sell you common components that will allow you to bring in a single fairly wide 'Net pipe and then allow you to set up access for all of the folks in your town without having to run a large amount of extra wire. These components can use your existing street light power, or when it makes sense, use our solar panel/battery backup system, or both. We'll help you design and install the system and everybody benefits...."

Or have I missed the target completely?

Power over Ethernet and Satellites

[GeekDork]

PoE specifies a rather huge range of input voltages, so if you're using PoE-enabled devices like the (apparently mostly defunct) MeshCubes, you can hook it up to pretty much every power source with a minimum of filters and transformers/voltage regulation. I'd imagine that using the common "wall wart" inputs could cause problems since those may require inputs in a rather narrow range. A simple car battery with some regulation electronics may do the trick though.

The main problem I see with the scenario is that if you don't have electricity, internet access becomes a secondary (tertiary? more-ary?) issue. Get some fridges running first and get clean drinking water, care about pr0n later. But if you have that, how about a base station with combined satellite up- and downlink and WiFi mesh capabilities? That could give you a good starting point and a valid excuse for more solar-powered mesh nodes.

Re:Power over Ethernet and Satellites

[Paulrothrock]

The main problem I see with the scenario is that if you don't have electricity, internet access becomes a secondary (tertiary? more-ary?) issue. Get some fridges running first and get clean drinking water, care about pr0n later

I'm planning on getting an inverter and hooking my fridge up to it, and water is provided by the city, so there's going to be pressure as long as there's water in the tower.

It's really a first-world problem I'm solving: When the power goes out I get bored. I've got a laptop which is good for a couple hours, but what to do with it if there's no net access?

St. Louis Park

[aviationwiz]

The city of St. Louis Park, MN uses solar-powered WiFi for everything now: http://www.stlouispark.org/residents/wireless.htm

not as cutting edge as the neutrino detector....

[jeffstar]

I've put together a few of these beasts. One network has 7 solar powered hops to the end node and a satellite connection to the internet. Skype works just fine from the end node, it is a little surreal to be in this isolated, remote location talking in to a laptop!

The key is having enough battery to get you through a multi day storm when there will be little sun. It doesn't matter how much solar panel you have when it isn't sunny as you are totally relying on the batteries then. Having more panels just gets your full charge back sooner. I believe we ended up with about 50A-hr of battery per radio.

We also had to build a circuit that would cut the power to the 802.11 radios when the volts got below a certain level (~10V) otherwise something in the power supply circuit of the radio would pop. The circuit would then drop the radio back in when the volts got up to 11 or 12V indicating that the batteries were charged again.

Temporary road side signs and other stuff

[l33tDad]

Doesn't the DOT already have a system like this working? I seem to recall many temporary (and some permanent) road signs, indicators, weather stations and even some cameras with a decent size solar panel on it along with a somewhat large box of what I assume is a battery pack. Couldn't this be adapted to wifi repeaters and AP's?

WRT54G will take a wide range of voltages

[bigtrike]

It is rumored that the linksys wrt54g has a DC-DC regulator which will run with between 10-30v of input power. Between this and its ability to run linux, its perfect for a versatile solar powered application.

Crime tip

[Alsee]

Solar Power ... surveillance cameras

That's why I only rob stores during eclipses.

-

Hyperlink had these in 2004

[bill_mcgonigle]

And that is the key -- it is a pre-built set of products.

I've got a page saved on my machine dated 7/11/2004 from hyperlinktech.com with that very thing. I think it was about $1200 at the time. You had to plug your own WRT54G into it, but everything else was included.

The page I have is called "12 VDC Solar Powered Outdoor System", but I didn't find it currently at hyperlink.

yeah old news, but new comments too.

[gsmb]

recycled 'news' just get used to it and have your positive input or just go read something else. :) This motivates me to get together a 'purpose built' geek packaged solar setup for running a computer up to say 3-400 watts/ 24 hours a day. (for my business.) I am DAMN sure many slashdotters would be interested as I am myself.... anyway here is the 'pre'slashvertisment. http://www.aquatooth.com/ Renewable energy solutions

Tech Support

[kwiqsilver]

Do you think their tech support call volume will pick up dramatically around 6-7pm?

I went out to watch the sunset, and when I came back, the network was down.

Cutting edge?

[nobuddy]

2 years ago I ran wireless 60 miles out to a dude ranch via solar powered relay towers, and a high power Wi-Fi AP in the middle of the compound, also solar. (A drilling company is leasing bandwidth off those towers too for their rigs to communicate over as well, but that's another story.) Tell me I ain't the first to think of letting the sun power remote devices? Please? It's so obvious I weep for the intelligence of mankind if this is so.