This is my solar powered setup. A somewhat old Pixel 6a that fell from a foot and a half (really!?), a 10w Solar setup that was around 20$ on amazon. And an old compost container I have too many of. Ill be giving it a proper 3d printed case when I get a chance (and a host of other changes) but for now this works! Its worth about 40$ in total (the phone is now worth about 21$ on the open market).
Website: https://solar.chrisco.me/
Website was made with a collection of scripts, apache2 (nginx for some reason did not install, errors), and termux. Ill open source the whole setup in a bit. Theres not much to it to be honest.
Hopefully keeping the battery at 80% will help the lifetime of the battery. I may bump it up at some point if it keeps dieing because lack of sunlight. But we shall see.
More info in the link. I couldn't get Piefed to repost from a GotoSocial link.
I'm curious as to how big of a load you've put on the system, so far. Is it just the site? What's the code for charging? Do you have it set to discharge to 30% then charge, or just charge to 80% whenever it's discharged some arbitrary amount? Sorry for the questions, I'm incredibly fascinated by this project!
I think like 5% at max? Apache2 + straight HTML is very low on cpu memory. Its probably overkill honestly.
Its auto set yp go to 80% petminantly as the highest charge. And android itself takes care of the heavy lifting when it comes to battery optimization.
I'd dare say the easier method, from memory the p6 should have a charge limit in the stock firmware.
I've not an old Samsung s10+ kicking around with corrupted firmware, should really take a look at it and see if it can be up and running again. Not that I need more cores, ram, cameras or any additions to my equipment but just because.
It fassinates me that consumer hardware, and low power at that goes wasted so often. So many small form factor devices such as phones, with built in ups aren't being leveraged. But I guess that comes down to proprietary binary blobs and developer work on a per device basis.
I might have to investigate what platforms mobile nixos supports and see if it's cheap enough to dabble with.