NOTE 10/17/2003 - These pages were originally located at: solitude.hampshire.edu
I am not actively working on this project and have also long since graduated from Hampshire College so I have archived the site here for long term storage. - jared

Solitude is a project to explore and build reliable and self-sustainable "independent entities" for remote applications. Bringing electricity into a remote location for applications such as data acquisition is often prohibitively expensive. The Solitude Project explores the viability of using renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro) to power these remote applications.

The two initial applications being explored are:

• Hampshire College Weather Station - Hampshire College is in the process of installing a Weather station in the middle of a field, hundreds of feet from the nearest building. The weather station is currently gets its power and communicates by wires. To connect this wires, costly trenches had to be dug. The solitude project hopes to demonstrate, and ideally implement a weather station which will be powered by solar power and transmit its data back to the Hampshire network by the 802.11 wireless technology.
• Hampshire College Windmill - The Hampshire windmill solitude project is meant to provide education to the public by putting renewable energy in plane view. Once restored, the windmill will use a hybrid wind/solar system to provide power to a wireless web server. The web server will server pages about the project and educate the public about renewable energy.

Other examples of Solitude applications:

• Remote lighting
• Wireless kiosks
• Remote web cams

Project News:

12/17/2000 - Several things have happened in the past couple weeks.

Wireless Stuff - I've continued to talk to Tom Corso with the plan to build our own antennas for the wireless part of things. It turns out the below name for the connector is actually the old wavelan connector. The new connector is called MC-CARD Right angle, Solder type. I've searched several connector manufacturers and the only place that seems to even know about them is Radiall. I've called them several times but still haven't actually talked to the one human who can tell me whether they are in stock or not. I did get them to fax me the specifications and send me a catalog. The catalog reports that the connector has to be manufactured after the order, which would explain the 20 week wait that the guy on the Seattle Wireless reported from Radiall. It looks like for now, we will have to hack the antenna from Power Macs or buy the 40 dollar pigtail converters from HyperLink Technologies. Two more airport base stations got ordered from money I procured from Academic Computing and COCD.

On the computing end of things - It turns out that the CR10X data logger from Campbell Scientific that was purchased for the weather station only comes with Windows software for retrieving data. Due to Windows' lack of reliability, I searched high and low for a Linux alternative. I came across Werner Eugster's home page. He has written Linux software to gather the data from the CR10X. Here is the page that mentions it. I had to contact him to actually get the software. He is extremely nice and has been very helpful with my questions.

The weather station installation is almost complete. Steve Roof has set up most of the sensors out on the tower. I installed the Linux software, and last week Steve Roof and I went out and tried it out. I was very surprised that our first try was successful at getting data. Josiah installed Linux on our wired data gathering computer and we are going to see how it works. The wiring in EDH should be done by Monday.

In the mean time, I've been preparing the Hampshire weather station web site. This has included writing a perl script to get the weather forecast from the National Weather Service, and setting up a web cam which shows the current conditions at Hampshire. It also builds a time lapse film of each day. Still some bugs to work out but some interesting results already.

Windmill stuff - I quickly talked with Larry Winship about the windmill on Friday. He mentioned that there was actually a need to pump water from the newly dug pond up to the vegetable fields. Either moving the existing windmill or building a new one would make sense as windmill's are great at pumping water. The current windmill needs major repair and it's tree blocked location is not very good.

11/28/2000 - I've managed to get an antenna which was mounted within a PowerMac G4. Here are a few photos: The whole antenna. the infamous connector which is called (unconfirmed) a, "SMZ" or, "BT type 43" connector. I have yet to find a source for these in the states. Here is the one of the two end plates. And here is Apple's little circuit board that connects the wires. Everything except the shot of the entire antenna is significantly enlarged.

11/23/2000 - I've now had two meetings with Tom Corso who is one of the network guys who works with Bob Crowley. Tom has a long background of HAM radio operation and is quite knowledgeable in the area of antennas. He has been tremendously helpful in the design of Hampshire Wireless. We hope to save money by building our own omni-directional antennae. I've also been in email contact with Jeremy Lemieux who works at UMass. He has been researching the implementation of Wireless at UMass and just placed an order for quite a bit of wireless hardware. He has also been talking with folks at Carnegie Mellon. CMU quite a bit of useful information on there Wireless Andrew pages, about how they are going about making wireless on campus happen.

Josiah was successful in getting the prototype-to-be laptop working with the Lucent wireless card. Debian seems to have been the only OS that would install, so that's what we are going with. With a working laptop and a soon to be installed wireless network, the only major obstacle left is getting solar panels and batteries. Tom Corso suggested asking certain businesses for their old batteries, which are used in battery operated carts. Can't remember what they are actually called.

11/18/2000 - This past week I met with COCD to request funding for the purchase of wireless equipment to expand the Hampshire Wireless effort. I received 700 dollars which is a fantastic start. I then met with Wil Doane who has purchased an access point for ASH to see how he can help build wireless access at Hampshire.

11/17/2000 - I did a presentation to students, faculty, staff and trustees today about the solitude project. I did my first, and last PowerPoint document which you can download here if you really wish. The rest of this site is likely much more useful. Other than nearly losing my voice, the presentation went well. A method of storing energy was brought up that I had never heard of. It involves pumping water up into a tower and then when you need the energy, letting the water flow and you can capture the energy. Interesting replacement for batteries. It will be interesting to see if the efficiency is good enough to be a viable solution for real applications. I was told that someone in Massachusetts is actually doing it, so it must be okay.

11/11/2000 - This past week I've been doing a lot of wireless work on the project. I've repositioned the Airport Lounge wireless base station for larger coverage and installed a software base station in Adele Simmons Hall. I've also contacted two students who own Wireless bases station. They have agreed to allow the Hampshire Community to connect to their access points, further increasing the campus coverage. I'm hoping that by giving some "supply" that the "demand" will soon follow. Once there is a demand, it will be much easier to justify Hampshire to purchase wireless equipment. I'm currently getting organized to make our wireless coverage more widely known right now. I've made Hampshire Wireless informational web pages and I've printed up some posters which I now just need to post in the "wireless zones".

Because money hasn't shown up yet, I broke down and bought some memory for the donated laptop and a wireless card, in hopes that I'll get reimbursed in the future. Josiah and I started to attempt an install but ran into some problems, so we'll have to get back to it next week. I've found some fairly good links on making wireless work under Linux and BSD.

I've also sized a solar array for running the computer 24 hours a day. This still could use some more analysis, but it looks like I'm going to need a 100 watt array and two 6 V 350 ah batteries. Until funding is found, I'll just have to wait. (I'll put the data up soon.) In the meantime, I'm working on the wireless stuff, and along with two other students working on a project to use a small solar panel that Hampshire owns to make a portable power bank that can be used by the farm center etc in areas that don't have power. This was just started this Friday, so it's got a ways to go, but the idea is to actually get our hands on some solar technology.

Josh Crawford has been helping me out with finding resources on antenna information. Building an antenna by hand is much cheaper but more complicated and confusing. Check the resources section for the new links.

10/24/2000 - Today I brought the "solar pathfinder" to the weather station site to see how much sun the site gets. Because the weather station is in the middle of a field and because it was very sunny today, I had a hard time taking the measurement and in the end decided there was NO shadows from trees buildings, etc that would block the panels. I'm going to try again at a later date to make sure that's the case, but until then I'm posting data of BTU/SQ. FT/DAY that comes with the solar pathfinder which is for NO shadows. Soon this data will be converted to kWh's so I can get one step closer to sizing solar panel's. I've been in contact with NESEA about data that they may have, but no one there seems to have data, which is surprising seeing as how they have a rather large solar array at their home office up the road in Greenfield. Oh well. The data is available here on the project page.

10/17/2000 - I did some data gathering for computer power consumption today. Check out the results on the project page. Or for those of you who dislike scrolling, here is the direct link.