I've had a chance to discuss this idea at length with a friend. Basically my next goal is to get a Raspberry Pi running completely on solar. It's not very effective, but it proves the idea. And hopefully I will get an address up, verifiable and created completely from solar power.
I guess my real goal is to make an energy efficient system, that transforms solar straight to 12 volt DC, which is what a computer really runs on. So an inverter would clean up and transform the solar to 12 volts and charge the battery. And the battery or batteries would run the computer system directly.
I have a laptop Chromebook with a broken screen that could efficiently run on 12 volts, as is. A desktop would need some wiring to bypass the 'power supply'. Since I have about 400 Watts and three pretty good batteries, I could probably run the Chromebook instead of a Raspberry Pi, or both.
The end goal, I suppose is to run a full server with large computing power, completely on solar. Lots of mini-computers could run at various ip-addresses there to power multiple identities that need hosting or backing.
I already have access to a cool place, close to a fiber line but kind of in the middle of nowhere. Since this location runs off-grid and is protected, it is the perfect place to run a crypto-currency. There is a good chance nothing this complicated will ever be built by me unless I discover spare thousands of dollars somewhere.
In summary, I believe exploring solar and lightweight computing to be a worthwhile goal.
Great idea, though until the devs do something about the algo CPU mining is dead due to the GPU vulnerability. Two miners have been dominating the queue for several days now because of this and most people are turning their miners off. Sad times!
nice. would the battery be able to maintain 24/7 running of the setup through the nite so as not to miss mining / witness queuing opportunities ? will be interesting to see what the breakeven cost to set this up would be
This is a great question and one of the main issues to solve. Eventually it may be nice to slow mining during the night.
I would like to see the results when you complete it.