this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Yeah, but won't you need enough electricity to power a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for this to work?
That doesn't take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).
If the monitor draws even 20W, you're gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
You'd be charging a battery, not running directly off the bike. Still, solar panels are extremely cheap these days. I picked up a 120 watt panel for 50 bucks recently, it could keep something like this running for hours each day.
So, I believe a tolerable generator load for most people to pedal is around 10W... battery charge / discharge is maybe 80% efficient, so you're netting 8W into your storage. Pedal relatively hard for an hour and you might get 20 minutes use of your IPS LCD screen.
Solar panels are indeed the way to go.
I mention ebikes because if we're in an apocalypse situation, your solar panels may not be very efficient. There are a ton of electric motors out there, so generating power is totally feasible in a prepper situation even if the sky is torched Matrix style, just attach any electric motor to a bicycle and you're good to go (or water or wind turbine, etc).
This unit can connect to a cell phone, that'd be a much less energy-expensive way to interface with it.
It sounds like you can connect with your phone, which reduces the energy footprint quite a bit.
A single rooftop solar panel can do that, and charge a battery for a little after dark use while you're at it.
A true prepper will get an eInk monitor and resist the urge to scroll until they read all the way to the bottom of the page, but even a normal monitor uses a small fraction of a solar panel. Keyboard? Near zero. Mouse? Near zero x10 but still near zero when compared with 200W. RasPi? less than a normal monitor.