Notes from a session held at the Luminous Green Hands-On Workshop, 3rd of May 2007

Pix

• following on from patrick's low power workstation discussion
• perhaps starting from a known power source (eg. the two solar panel setups and their batteries) and trying to fit an installation within their power output envelope.
• inconsistent power.
  • as well as dealing with low power, it is worth considering that the power source may be unreliable. what does your system do if it temporarily loses power? a dedicated system without a large operating system should be able to recover faster (no boot-up time).
  • although some dedicates systems are still slow to power-up anyway, like digital cameras.
  • the transient nature of the power could also be used as an aesthetic device.
• a short discussion about the practicalities of programming microcontrollers. arduino, and other simplifying alternatives.
• ideas from the group for low power installations:
  • patrick's low power general workstation
  • autonomous wireless audio/video streaming station
  • embedded dedicated video
  • dedicated, minimal implementation as an aesthetic goal
  • tiny speakers driven by solar
• small vs clean (dedicated)
• nano itx and xp embedded, still not very dedicated (a lot of functionality you don't need even when stripped down)
• the second half of the session was with a much smaller group. we decided to look a little more at the challenging dedicated video idea. we decided to look at an existing implementation (a broken dvd player) for inspiration.
• while researching the chips we saw used in the dvd player we had access to (ESS vibrato II), we found a community based around hacking an earlier version of it's board, made by a company called Sampo. it appears that earlier versions of it's ESS based dvd players used an IDE dvd-drive. IDE is the bus used in home computers for hard drives and CD-roms, making it easy to replace the dvd reader with a hard drive. it's also possible to change the firmware on the chip by playing a specially made dvd.

How to size a solar energy system