Wind-up website

Yep. It's a silly as this sounds. This is a website that is powered by hand cranking a small generator. No battery. If nobody is cranking, it won't work...

Really?

Yes! If you're on windup.jonathanhickford.com then this is website powered by somebody hand cranking the webserver.

If you're visiting the imnotcurrentlywinding.windup.jonathanhickford.com you're on a traditionally powered mirror of this page that exists for when I have better things to do...

How does this work?

The website and webserver is running on a small ESP8226 microchip, which is powered by the hand cranked generator. It powers up, connects to a wi-fi network, and serves a few files.

I use the wifi hotspot of my phone, so I can't forward ports. I'm using a MQTT VPN system. So what really happens is:

• The ESP8226 runs a webserver, and connects to wi-fi.
• The ESP8226 connects to a public facing MQTT broker, which acts as a VPN client.
• There's a traditionally powered nginx webserver running on windup.jonathanhickford.com. It's connected to the same MQTT VPN, and proxies all http requests over the MQTT VPN to the ESP8226.

My thanks to the authors of the MQTT_VPN library.

How could this be improved?

Well obviously any other power source and a battery would make this a more reliable website, but that's not the point...

Some ideas:

• Use a GSM module, which would mean this works without wi-fi.
• If the device could have a static IP address I could do away with the proxy.
• https all the way would be good. Currently SSL is terminated at the proxy, and the MQTT VPN isn't using an MQTT broker behind SSL, so the https feels a bit dishonest.
• A smaller crank, as ideally the whole thing would be smaller. I'd have bought a smaller one, but the reviews suggested they just fall apart.

Why?

I was inpsired by LOW←TECH magazine and the solar powered version of their website. However that's too practical for my tastes, e.g. with a battery so it works overnight and on cloudy days.