A solar-powered Linux laptop is being designed | Hacker News Reader

A solar-powered Linux laptop is being designed

zdnet.com

17 pointstanglesome12 comments

I don't understand the convergence here at all. Isn't it better to just have whatever laptop is best for you and whatever solar power source is best for you?

Probably the fact that it is a very low-power laptop helps it run only with solar power. If it can't run on sun alone, I guess that it's not very useful at all.

I think Joey Hess already has a solar powered Linux laptop, albeit its not commercially available. Does anyone else have a setup like this?

http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/

Joey has his whole house wired to a PV setup. Not really the same thing as mounting one on the back of a laptop: for one, you can make the panel bigger and thus get more energy quite easily. Having just the surface area of the laptop constrains you quite a bit. With current technology you can only get around 10-20 W out of a laptop-sized PV panel.

I believe the panel unfolds from the back of the laptop, becoming 3x the size. 30-60W might not power a desktop replacement, but it's something like 10x what a 2013 mba 11" draws. (38WH battery, 11+hour battery life in optimal conditions)

Oh, triple unfold is a little more reasonable. Still, the 10-20 W was fairly optimistic; you might get the 20 W with a good panel with the laptop closed and the lid flat in noon sun. With the unfold it'd be enough power to charge and run an Atom laptop (charge at midday, use in shade earlier/later), but it's still not strictly comparable to Joey Hess's setup. Different scale, different purpose.

This seems like a very interesting and ambitious goal, but the price seems way off. It looks like the child of a $2000 ToughBook and a few hundred dollars worth of solar cells. Could anyone speculate about the COG?

I don't understand why they would position it at $400 anyways, when certain types of customers (those doing aid work, or safaris, or whatever else people from North America and Europe do in remote places) would certainly be willing to splash out a few grand. The founder explicitly says their goal isn't the same as OLPC. You could even rent them to tourists (like those international MiFi companies).

A few hundred dollars could get you a full 3' x 5' 250W panel plus a microinverter.

it's actually 350. i'm not sure why they claimed the price wasn't announced, as the bottom of the page clearly has a price for both: a 350 model and a submersible version for 400. http://solaptop.com/en/products/laptops/

If they can get the price down, pairing this with the Google balloon WiFi would be awesome. Making it easier and cheaper for people in developing countries to get online would be great.

Previous discussion- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6167099

I seriously question why they went with the deprecated Atom instead of a ULV i3. Maybe price concerns, but I think the people who would buy this device would be willing to spend the extra $200 so it could have an actually good processor.

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