Solar Protocol Hackathon

Solar Protocol is a global network of small scale solar powered servers that direct traffic and computational activity to whichever server is in a location with the most sunlight at a given time. The project is led by Alex Nathanson, Tega Brain, and Benedetta Piantella.

The goal of this hackathon is give folks more avenues to contribute to the Solar Protocol project and join our community.

This hackathon will primarily focus on software development. There are a ton of opportunities to contribute to the Solar Protocol project. These range from media art projects to improving data visualizations to creating educational content to refactoring existing code to be cleaner, and much more!

We'll begin with an introduction to the project and an overview of the potential ways you can contribute to the project. We'll have 2 hours for hacking on whatever you would like to work on. Participants are not expected to produce a finished project in that time. This hackathon is meant to be a jumping off point for longer term contributions.

Recommended Prerequisites:

• It is recommended that participants have experience programming with Python. See our tech stack below.
• Read our recent paper, which provides an overview of our design methodology: Solar Protocol: Exploring Energy-Centered Design

Email Alex Nathanson with questions at alex@alexnathanson.com

Tentative Schedule (Eastern Standard Time)

• 10-10:30 introductions
• 10:30-11:30 Overview of the Solar Protocol project by Alex Nathanson (SP technical and community overview, resource sharing, possibilities, project needs, opportunities for collaborating, etc.)
• 11:30-12 Project brainstorming
• 12-20 Break
• 12:20-2:20 Hack!
• 2:20-3 : share work, future roadmap, and closing remarks

Tech stack:

• Linux running on Raspberry Pi
• Apache servers
• Our code is primarily written in Python
• PHP is also used for the API and some dashboards

Resources & Links

• http://www.solarprotocol.net
• https://computingwithinlimits.org/2022/papers/limits22-final-Brain.pdf
• https://github.com/alexnathanson/solar-protocol