The Brief#
So yea, I’m building a permanent home for the ephemeral contents of the web. A knowledge vault. It’s seeds the vault in Norway, but it’s seeds of a different kind, it’s knowledge seeds. It’s a copy of Wikipedia, tutorials, howto’s, what to eat and not die in the wilderness. Instead of inside of the guts of a mountain it’s inside of..a case I designed.
This whole thing runs on solar power because hey, planets on fire anyway might as well try to help a little. That and you know the sun will always be available as an energy source for free…until we figure out how to bill for sunlight (don’t worry I’m sure Nestle is working on this right now). Technically I could say I built a nuclear powered computer…and that’s metal as hell.
The Setup#
Hardware:
- Raspberry Pi 4
- Solar panels
- Enough batteries to make my neighbors suspicuous
- 6-8 hours daily runtime (roughly as long as it took you to exit vim for the first time)
Philosophy:
- If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen
- If the internet goes down, we should still be able to figure out how things work
- Everything should be repairable with stuff you can actually buy (or scavenge off a deserted hulk in the wasteland)
- Failure is just content waiting to happen
What You’ll Find Here#
Experiments the worked:
- Solar charging optimization (or how I suck at math and why it matters)
- Pi configurations that don’t immediately drain the battery (or set the Pi on fire)
- Power monitoring that borders on the obsessive
Experiments that didn’t:
- Also documented, meticulously. Watching me make them will be hilarious, and hey maybe you don’t make the same ones
- Spoiler Alert: there will be many
Rabbit Holes:
- Why sustainable tech isn’t just for hippies …stuff offers a unique engineering challenge
- The surprisingly difficult task of making things “simple”
- Occasional rants about proprietary things, and I’ll even beat a few dead horses!
The Why#
Look, we live in an age where all human knowledge is one search away, unless the WiFi’s down (because WiFi is hard), or the server’s down (you are aware that the internet runs on servers and not magic pixie dust running through a series of tubes?), or the company got bought by someone who thinks information should cost money, or… you get the idea.
This project is my small, probably futile middle finger at keeping useful information available even when everything else goes completely sideways (or you know get’s locked behind a paywall). Plus, and here’s the real answer, it gives me an excuse to buy more electronics and call it “research”.
The Journey#
Every success, every spectacular failure, every “why did I think that would work” moment gets documented here. This isn’t a polished showcase - it’s the actual process of figuring things out, complete with dead ends and questionable decisions. I’m not genetically blessed enough to have an OnlyFans so this is my attempt to show you everything, warts and all.
If you’re here, you probably went to page 4 of Google or you make things too. Welcome to my chaos!
“Knowledge belongs to humans, not to a single point of failure.”