Parallella Community

Hey guys,
I would like to aquire a Parallella system and use it for BOINC crunching. I would like to crunch on all cores 24/7 and if possible I would like to power my system entirely by solar power. Unfortunately I have no experience yet with solar powered systems and thus I don't know which components (solar cells, batteries, inverters,...) would be sufficent for this case. Do you have any recommendations? Any help would be highly appreciated.
I live in Germany, which isn't that sunny but I'm optimistic that I will be able to ignore this fact if I have some highly efficient equipment.

P.S: Is anybody aware of any attempts to port the World Community Grid (WCG) software to the Parallella architecture?

Nowadays, there are little solar panels on messenger bags and stuff that can be used to charge small electronics or whatever. Given the low power requirement of the Parallella, I don't think it would be hard to find something small and simple that works. If you wish to actually have a 'real' solar panel, I would recommend http://v3solar.com/ if you can wait 9-12 months for commercial production. As for WCG, if there were anything going on that front, someone would most likely post on this forum.

As I want to run the system 24/7 I would at least need an additional battery as well. I saw a guy on this forum who managed to set up a solar powered Raspberry system. If he reads this: Which components did you use for this?
I'll check for some solar chargers. How many watts do you think will suffice?

Thanks for your reply 9600. Indeed I was refering to your article. I really would like to avoid stronger equipment than I actually need because I have to look after my money as a poor student.
My first thought was to use a car battery but now this seems to be way too much to power a 5 Watt device 24/7. Well, hopefully the boards will be out for everyone soon, so that I can get my hands on one and see what does suffice and what doesn't.

In terms of a BOINC port I am not sure I can help much. My programming skills have atrophied over the last 10 years since I was a full time programmer and even then I was only involved with the high level languages (mainly Visual Basic, SQL Server and Oracle). I will ask about though.

Maybe you could ask "officially" in the BOINC Dev mail list?


A control circuit to monitor/manage a UPS or battery system would be very useful in many areas and not just solar powered BOINC crunchers.

Have you seen the latest news regarding the use of graphene based batteries and graphene based solar panels?

They are still in the proof of concept stage, but they are going to revolutionize the field.