Hello Server
Solar Server is up and running
Solar Server is up and running! ☀️☀️☀️ You can visit the website solarserver.games which is running off the solar-powered web server (unless it goes down from lack of sun or some other issue as the project is still in its baby form).
My current set up is a 120Watt solar panel I bought off Kijiji (aka Canadian craigslist), a marine deep cycle sealed lead-acid battery, also used from Kijiji, an 8.5 charge converter that came with the solar panel, and a buck converter my dad gave me. Originally I was going to go lithium ion for the battery but lead-acid works better in the cold apparently, which I have to be mindful of in Calgary where it gets below -20 celsius for a good chunk of the winter. I had to wait a month or two for a Raspberry Pi as there was a “supply chain shortage,” and sadly I was not able to source any used ones. It was a difficult to research and learn the different terminology and measurements for the set up, but putting it all together was very easy.
I’m hesitant to share this set up because there are still some modifications I want to make and have lots of things I want to test out. I’d like to put in a battery power meter so I can better track it, and I look forward to seeing how well it all survives days without sun (rare in Calgary) or with extreme cold (as I mentioned, less rare in Calgary). I’m also getting a table to raise the panel higher and a waterproof bin for the battery, Pi, and converters. Part of this project will be to share a design guide for both the hardware and the design ethos of the games, but that will likely be in a year or so once I feel confident in how it is working when people are actually playing games on it.
It was much more challenging to set up the server itself than the power rig. Though I only have a bit of experience with electronics, I have near zero in web development. There are lots of tutorials on building one’s own web server and both my dad and my partner provided a lot of guidance, yet still I got stuck for over an hour trying to figure out an issue where when I was on my local network I could only access the website using the local IP address and not the external IP address (the mystery is yet to be solved—the router thinking it is suspicious activity?!?). But still, it was all set up in a single afternoon.
Next comes my least favourite part: web design. It takes me a long time to find an aesthetic I both like and can reasonably accomplish when I’m making games, but I absolutely hate making websites of any kind. They are gross. Either they all have the same awful wix/squarespace look or they are almost impossible to navigate and also still are gross. I was tempted to keep the prototype website for solarserver.games.
Now there is a slightly better, very plain, but hopefully fine-enough-for-now website. I will make it nicer eventually, but probably not that much nicer. It will have updated weather info for Calgary so people can expect if the site might go down due to a few cloudy days in a row, and it will also show the battery level once I have a physical battery meter. The site, like all aspects of the project, is being made with an eye towards low-carbon design practices. This means static sites, native fonts, compressed images; generally, meaningful limitations.
Now that the server itself is mostly set, I will be working more on the actual game for it. The first is Known Mysteries, which I’ll share more about in the next updates.