> We chose a cheap off-the-shelf switchable voltage 20W hand-crank generator marketed for emergency USB charging. The Pi normally draws around 1.5A, but when it’s working hard (as it does when doing inference on the CPU), its current requirements can increase substantially, causing the generator voltage to sag below the Pi’s required 4.8V or even, in the case of a momentary 5A spike, to trigger the generator’s internal overcurrent protection and shut off the voltage output entirely, causing the Pi to brown out.

> To ensure the Pi sees a steady voltage when the full inference stack kicks in (and to afford crankers a little rest), we built a custom capacitor board [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zv_Hsinvx_sWtdur4iWY...] to smooth out the generator’s output and act as a short-term (~20 second) power reservoir.

Somewhat off-topic, but could this capacitor board work with a small-ish 5V USB solar panel? I'm not great with electronics, but it seems like just the solution for a device I want to run with the panel.

My vague impression was it's not kosher per the USB spec to just stick a capacitor across the supply to even out the brown-outs, but this looks like it's doing some other stuff.

When I was at Peloton a long time ago, someone proposed an April Fools’ joke where we could announce a dynamo add-on that would let you power your house from your bike.

The math isn’t as bad as you might think: 200Wh (about a 60 min, somewhat intense ride) seems to be about 20 minutes for a H/B100. Still 3x, but not bad at all!

I remember the idea being dismissed quickly because people would likely actually want it.

I bet if you took one of Taalas' cards which consumes 200 watts for 14,000 tokens/second [0] and slowed it down by a factor of 10, it would actually be quite reasonable to power by bicycle.

[0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...

I kept thinking this was a play on crank as in charlatan and crank as in hand-crank. Generate any flavor of crankery with the turn of a crank. Turns out it wasn't satire...

This is hilarious.

And also it mades me realize that we would all be way more healthy if we powered our laptops from bike power.

This makes me yearn for the golden years of april fools online.

https://github.com/ktomanek/edge_voice_agent linked repo behind the concept

I tried visiting the site but the design was incredibly annoying.

I take it this was some kind of joke.

And here I thought this was gonna be a Playdate GPT client app.

This is so cool; I wonder what the roadmap includes? I'd love to see if this could evolve from gag product/gift idea, to a solar-powered inference box on slightly more robust hardware, for instance, completely freeing the owner from any need to purchase a subscription or rely upon the grid for inference. That would be freaking cool and I'm sure would sell a ton if the models that could run on the hardware were sufficiently capable and could be piped into a laptop (which seems like the easiest part). What would the power requirements be to run a more capable model than the ones used, maybe a DeepSeek open-source model? Really curious but I'm unfamiliar with the technical details that might go into such calculations.