So when the sun goes down....
...and the batteries are low on charge, are you SOL too?
Apologies.
Steven R
WeWi Telecommunications has built what it claims is the world’s first “fully solar-powered laptop”, which it says never needs to be juiced up at the mains. The SOL, a solar-powered Ubuntu machine on the Canadian telco’s blog here, is billed as “the all-terrain, off-road, sport-utility laptop.” SOL is for when you need to be …
You want one? I've been wanting one since the 1980s.
But I want one with much lower-power components. Like, for instance, ARM processor, e-ink screen, SSD storage. Lighten the whole thing - notably the battery and panels - to be truly portable, as well as giving it a much longer battery lifetime even when it spends days in a backpack.
I have an e-ink reader, I use it every day. However the lack of colour means it's not possible to tell if text has been highlighted with different colours if the text itself is in different colours and what those colours are. Diagrams can be confusing. A colour e-ink screen, even if it is slightly washed out would get round this but no one has brought that technology to market (in the UK at least) and would I imagine drive the cost of the unit up.
The refresh rate and ghosting would be a bigger issue if all you wanted it for was browsing the web and office work. Imagine typing away at sixty words a minute or scrolling through a long article.
I'd go for Arch Linux, personally. I built a stripped-down Arch system on my Eee 701SD, and the little fella zips along, largely thanks to not having all the "lard" a typical Ubuntu installation sticks in there. (Oh, and the RAM maxed-out to 2GB. Every little helps.)
That said, if Debian gives you a similar opportunity to work up from a minimal base installation and choose only the bits you want/need, that should do just as well.
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In this particular instance I was thinking of carefully filleting out everything I didn't want so as not to disturb things like power control or networking.
Normally I install the basic debian with no desktop or 'standard' stuff, then apt-get openbox and ROX. That pulls in all the graphical stuff I actually need, and minimal gtk libraries. From then on it's just installing what I want on that particular machine.
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well their page graphics take hours to download, maybe they are preparing you for the battery recharge?
Nice idea, not sure how they are going to do that for $300 I'm assuming the cost of panels will be a significant part?
Paris because she will go all night without a recharge.
You know I wish el Reg had a decent comment system that allowed edits.
Those panels look like the couple-of-watt solar trickle chargers you can get from Maplins for a tenner or so. Given the panel component cost will be a lot less than that, they might add up to less of the total materials cost than you might think.
Whether it can really charge a netbook battery to full in two hours anywhere further North or South than the Tropics, is another matter.
Price has jumped to $350 and the product isn't actually available to buy yet (so there's a chance the price will jump again). The specs claim 1080p graphics and then have a display res of 1366x768, hmm. Still an Ubuntu laptop that's "submersible" (!) with solar panels for $350 does sound interesting, though it'll be 350 quid if it ever gets sold to UK users of course.
I wonder what made them choose Ubuntu over Windows? Not that I'm complaining, it just seems to be bucking the trend a little more than your average laptop (overlooking the solar panels of course).
For my activities in WICEN (Wireless Institute Civil Emergency Network), this sort of device looks ideal.
Given the specs theres a chance you can, although don't expect more than netbook performance from that atom cpu.
The marine version seems promising, might make a decent machine for tethered shooting in humid \ misty \ rainy conditions. It would be great to see another version in a year or so with one of the newer atoms, support for more ram \ usb 3.0 etc. A 1080p screen would also be great but its probably too far from the target market.
Ok so it has plenty of solar capacity with the solar panel that folds out but why oh god why did they make it so when the solar panel is folded in not a single panel is left exposed on the back of the lid!!!!! so much charging opportunities missed! what spends most of the time facing the sky? yes the LID !!
I'd guess the thinking was that a device designed for use off grid in rough conditions isn't something you'd casually leave lying in the sun when not using it. Leave it deliberately in charging configuration yes, otherwise keep it safely in its case. Still a serious oversight though.
Even better if they could safely build a backpack that exposed the panels while trekking, a very likely use.
It says right there on the site - free power, free software. I think they are promoting it as free power + free software = freedom (also, presumably, freedom from malware). Even their video, which I liked, seems to be aimed at people who spend a lot of time outdoors (more freedom than office drones).