Brad Ideas - power - Comments

easy, but there's a betterway to get stuff greengridded

davea0511 — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 04:27:36 -0800

This is what ... over 6 years old ... but it's a great ideal and such a controller still doesn't exist. There are similar things, but none of them are designed to tap 100% of the power of the panel live, and store none of it, which is as Brad says is the most economical use of solar power. In fact, the most efficient way would be to feed into the DC voltage of the computer. What you're looking at then is a solar computer PSU, just a PSU with a 12V input, which is how this should be designed. There are 12V panels that can be daisy chained.

Or a 12V to variable output DV to DC transformer, which you should be able to plug into any laptop.

Sadly, the bulk of Americans are a bad fit (and always will be) for onsite solar because they're either apartment dwellers, up north, back east, have poorly placed roofs and trees, etc

Besides, it's unlikely that the average 1m^3 of onsite panels will ever provide much more than 100Watts.

Like with Brad here, I've racked my brain for solutions and this one even crossed my mind, but ultimately concluded *fair* power-offsetting as the only solution.

I say *fair* because the problem is that all the power-offset solutions (and there are 100's of companies that will take your money to "offset your power") are total ripoffs because they don't give you ownership of the panels that they purchase with your money - and instead keep the generated power to line their pockets - it's a pock mark on the green industry that has yet to be fixed.

So I did something about it when I founded net0power. Make your PC greengridded, and then have net0power send you a check for the power + incentives (minus space rent and maintenance) earned in the southwest where they'll go. Check out greenthepower.com for more info. It's not live yet ... we're still in the startup phase.

Problems are as follows

Ian — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:33:36 -0800

Laptop doesn't have the drive capacity I need. There are a total of 10 drives in my system set-up in RAID 10 on an OpenSuSE Linux system. This system runs dual 30" monitors with an HDMI feed to my TV. That's where the majority of my power draw comes from, the drives. Although I am in the process of moving to green hybrid drives for laptops. Since the SATA connections in a laptop is identical to that in a PC and there is no significant voltage differences in operations, I am finding I can reduce, noise, heat and power consumption by moving to the 2.5" laptop hybrid green drives from Seagate. I should have the drive conversion complete within the next month or two.

Anyhow this primarily is a database and application development workstation I use at home that runs several virtual machines for application testing. But it's also my personal computing and entertainment system when I am not working. Basically it's my all in one solution, hence why so many drives.

At night it's part of a distributed network for protein folding and a genome project. Otherwise I would just get a 17" laptop with an external storage drive and not worry about it. When the generator is up, I am down which is why I need to find a solution. If I can find a reasonably priced UPS that can handle dirty voltage coming in, then that is the route I would run. Right now I am entertaining the idea of a solar/battery power source.

Lower powered PC

brad — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:26:35 -0800

I suspect the first step, unless you truly need a super-powered PC, would be to switch to a high powered laptop. This of course has a built in UPS and is probably easier to make tolerant of the bad power or able to run on the DC power. Since you did not do that, I presume you really need all that power but there are ways to make desktops much lower power. New monitors with LED backlights draw much less power than older CCFL ones. You can also consider having a desktop that suspends quickly and you bring it up when you want to do the intense compiler builds etc. (Check into distcc which will spread compiler builds among other machines, including ones in the cloud if you have enough bandwidth but I presume you don’t.)

More rarely you can find desktop pcs built on lower power laptop components. But your laptop is going to idle at more like 10 to 20w, not 180 watts and that will make all the difference, and it’s a lot cheaper than all the equipment you have.

Question about solar powered PC 100% off grid.

Ian — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 11:04:37 -0800

I live in the mountains on private property where the owner provides electricity via a diesel generator + inverter / battery array. His property and he won't consider PV. Anyhow an issue I have run into is when he runs the generator the sine wave is dirty so it throws my UPS into a conniption fit and essentially causes the transfer relay to bounce. My search for a UPS that can handle this has been pretty dismal so far, but I am still looking.

Anyhow I came up with the brilliant idea of a solar+battery power source for my PC. This way I could run my PC 24/7 reliably and not worry about the UPS getting smoked. I am on my second UPS now... first one lasted 3 months before the relay fused. My job requires my main system to be up and running 24/7/365 and normally this is possible, but currently I have not been able to do so and it's has been having an adverse effect on my ability to do what I need to.

So what I am trying to do is get a clear answer as to how and what I will need to build an independent solar+battery powered system to run my main PC. My last check shows peak wattage at 400, and that is when I am working with databases and compiling code. Average wattage is around 180 - 200watts (this is a multi-drive (RAID) system with a dual output graphics card).

My thought was this:

2 - 230W solar panels
2 - 12V AGM batteries
1 - 600W Inverter
1 - Charge regulator

Where I live I am in the mountains with 6.25hours of solar potential and I have a clear unobstructed view south.

Does this sound reasonable?

As a side thought, I would

Kaytonk — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:14:04 -0800

As a side thought, I would prefer long term for it to be taken one step further and a generic docking station implemented. That way peripherals are also easily connected. It would have to suit various sizes, but as it is essentially just a platform with plugs at the back, it shouldnt be too hard.

I used to be an Optima repair agent, and the Stands they provided to schools used a single connector to a power board that then had fixed plugs at the back of the unit, so that you could easily charge them on stand and keep the normal power supplies on the desks.

The biggest stalling point

Kaytonk — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:06:16 -0800

The biggest stalling point is of course the manufacturers, selling replacement power supplies is acutally fairly lucrative, hence in manuals they strongly advise against 'inferior generic power supplies' (remind you of ink catridges?) citing all sorts of rubbish reasons. Having anything generic means better competition for sales of that generic product, hence the price is driven down, which is great for us, but poor for manufacturers.

There is of course the argument that with most manufacturers having the generic connection that the 'odd one out' would lose sales and be forced to join the mainstream connector, the problem will be convincing the majority of manufacturers to change to this connector in order to make it the standard.

The interum measure you have suggested is sound, it would be a convenient way for consumers to connect, but I can't see it forcing manufacturers to adopt the new standard long term, as long as we can adapt to whatever they are using there is no incentive to change

That's not it

brad — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:28:23 -0800

First of all, the bandwidth to that device would not be nearly enough for the things I discuss. And as far as I know it costs a good deal more than the $400 or so such monitors cost.

Realize that one of the goals would be to drive a 4 megapixel monitor with DVI-single, which only does just over 2 megapixels at 60fps. With a simple protocol like the one described above, you would be able to drive a 2 megapixel square in a rectangle of the monitor at 60fps if you did not want to paint the other windows often. You would also be able to display a 4 megapixel movie from any of today’s modern compression formats (which do not update more than a fraction of the screen per frame in almost all frames) with occasional drops down to 30fps for complete scene changes.

There already are protocols for much lower bandwidth (sub-gigabit) video which require a lot of smarts in the monitor, such as VNC and X. This is a protocol for medium (and lower) bandwidth that requires minimal smarts in the monitor, just the ability to specify where to draw in the frame buffer, and when. The monitor would be (as it already is) responsible for displaying the contents of its frame buffer on the actual screen.

Frameless Video

CyberFonic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:03:32 -0800

There is another way, and it is here! Right now. You can buy a 27" Apple iMac for hardly much more than what it would cost to buy the monitor. For simple applications you'd just run X-windows, VNC, whatever and your connectivity is a mere gigE LAN. All standard and available.

For real power, you'd actually run the "View" portion of a true MVC designed application (one where each of M, V, C run as one or more separate processes).

So basically, you simply have the LCD and GPU tightly coupled and the applications would run headless, or should that me Hydra like, with as many heads as you like. Plan9 and Inferno (from Bell Labs / Lucent) have implemented this type or architectures ages ago and IBM have considerable amount of compute resources running in this manner. So why not your lowly desktop environment. Silicon is getting cheaper everyday.

GPUs

brad — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:35:07 -0800

GPUs work with polygons, have alpha channels and much more. They can do complex translations and 3-D mappings. Though basic GPU function in the display is probably something that happens over time, the function I describe is way below what GPUs do today. It’s more like the bitblt terminal from Bell Labs 30 years ago.

Optical and power

brad — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:32:50 -0800

Yes, I do expect optical to play a role. The main issues are fragility of the cable, and inability to carry power. We can get 10gb on copper but that may be close to the limit. Though we keep breaking our limits. A mixture of copper and (optional) fiber might be a good approach, copper for power and some gigabits, optical for the rest of the gigabits.

As for protocols, the universal cable should of course carry everything. We already have a working solution for that called IP.

Intel Light Peak

tuacker — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:22:35 -0800

Intel is currently working on Light Peak a new high-speed optical cable technology which shows some promises to replace all connectors with one. It also allows to run multiple protocols over the same wire, you can read more here: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm

Your proposed protocol is

corysama — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:57:56 -0800

Your proposed protocol is pretty similar to a simple GPU command buffer protocol. Reading it gives me the feeling that what you are going to end up with is duplicating or moving the GPU into the display device --effectively stretching the PCI-Express bus over a DVI cable.

Whether or not that's a good idea.. I have no comment. I just wanted to mention which wheel your invention looks like from a distance.

Various protocols

brad — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:16:22 -0800

Have not tried that one but there are, as I said, many protocols that have existed in the past to squeeze video over a slower channel like USB. I’ve have one (of a different make) and have seen projectors that use USB and wifi to receive video (this is nice for shared projectors in presentation rooms.)

However, the goal is not to do this, but rather to still try for a lot of bandwidth but make the best of the bandwidth you have if you don’t have enough — rather than to design for specific low bandwidth applications.

While it would be nice to do this (and of course things like Displaylink, X windows, VNC and other protocols exist to do this) I feel they are hard to standardize in hardware. The more complex the protocol the less likely we would get a good hardware standard. Though of course if we start demanding the monitors be smarter and smarter they can have firmware of their own to allow support of new protocols and extensions.

My goal is a little different, to find a way to do full resolution video over a channel that is “almost fast enough” — ie. from an older generation of hardware.

USB 3.0 is actually fast enough to be “almost fast enough” for example.

Brad, are you aware of

Frank Ch. Eigler — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:06:25 -0800

Brad, are you aware of DisplayLink?
http://www.displaylink.com/technology_overview.html

Lenovo ThinkPads

Dineth — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 03:33:19 -0700

Hey Brad... just across this randomly. Thought I'd mention, this is available now in some ThinkPads from Lenovo. There's a yellow USB port which can draw out power from the AC adapter without waking the computer at all. And i think the newer models like T400S can drain the battery power to power another device when AC is not present (and the laptop is off)! Pretty darn cool!!