Potato server?

[altivo]

We've all heard of and probably seen potato clocks, which were (perhaps still are) digital clocks powered by electrodes stabbed into a potato or two. I had one on my desk years ago, and it runs fine until the potatoes start to rot. I switched to potted plants, and it worked there too as long as I remembered to water them...until the electrodes corroded, that is.

Anyway, in a significant one-upsmanship, how about a Potato powered web server? It's gone offline now because the author got tired of replacing rotten potatoes, but still... beats any battery powered microcomputer I've ever had or seen. Green power too, as long as you compost the rotten potatoes.

Weather here is threatening, rumbly, and breathless. Humid, though not terribly hot, and just waiting for rain. So far just a little drizzle, though.

Comments

[alexsious.livejournal.com]

a potato? people are crazy. according to the link it is very green, but I suspect it is highly inefficient to run such a slow server. the cost of potatoes alone required to power any sort reasonable server would exceed the cost of electricity. I swear, as more people use crops as power, we are going to have a famine. We have pretty much based everything we have on corn now....so if there is a bad year for corn we are screwed. granted that we are a global economy and it would require the entire world to have a bad year for the famine to occur. We fare slightly better than the Irish did with the potato famine. but I do see a famine occurring should the global supply of corn fail.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It was done to prove a point, not as a demonstration of anything superb. Suppose, for instance, that you needed a server just to deliver monitoring data, like the temperature and humidity or something. This isn't a LiveJournal kind of server, after all, and isn't intended to be.

But for a tiny, simplistic task like that, these days most folks would set up a whole Pentium type PC with Windows on it. As he points out, the tiny server can run for months on a single AA battery.

You're right about corn, of course, and many of the uses to which it has been put are not exactly healthy either. As far as green power goes, though, a series of three or four potted plants, kept properly watered, can replace the potatoes. No waste there at all. In fact, the plants could be cherry tomatoes or hot peppers and produce an actual byproduct that is useful.

[alexsious.livejournal.com]

I'm just getting worried about the corn. its in EVERYTHING.

as far as the server goes. I guess my perception of what a "server" is, is ill informed. To me "server" means a distributer of some sort. I see the a "server" on a grander scale I guess. I never really thought about smaller applications like monitoring as you have mentioned.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Technically, a server serves out data on request. The data might be as simple as the current time or temperature, or as complex as the closing prices on the NYSE. ;D

Telemetry data from an unmanned satellite or space craft is another example. It might be sent continuously, but to save power now it is often accumulated and delivered in one compressed block on receipt of a command from the monitoring station. The software and hardware that does that is a server just as much as google.com is a server.

[jairus-greywolf.livejournal.com]

So the term "debugging" could literally mean just that! :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it could, though in the case of the actual potato, I think it would more likely be "deworming." ;p

[megadog.livejournal.com]

I can just see the error messages:

"System down due to Colorado Beetle attack!"

[zachary-geminus.livejournal.com]

Screw potato clocks, I wanna see more pickle lamps!

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

"It will also smoke a little and stink. Ignore these effects..." *grin*

Also.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Waste of a good pickle if you ask me. ;p