The Lawnmower IRC Server
32 points by calvin
32 points by calvin
It’s just a battery powered RaspPi strapped to a lawnmower.
It could be strapped anywhere it seems, the lawnmower isn’t important.
I’m kind of disappointed, I thought they’d have an alternator or something charge a car battery and power the server.
It tracks how much has been mowed, and it at one point had a headache-inducing video feed, so it’s not completely unrelated to the lawnmower. Still, I appreciate the effort!
It’s an actually used lawnmower running a production Undernet server. Come on, that’s pretty cool.
Yeah, it is kinda cool. I just think it’d be cooler if it had more connection to the lawnmower. Like right now it’s just a computer and sensors attached to a lawnmower, but those could be anywhere and don’t really have any integration with the lawnmower beyond being physically attached.
I thought it was a fancy lawnmower with a controlling unit repurposed as an irc server. A bit disapointed to in the sense that the lawnmower is mostly a marketing stunt. But this is the case of most raspberry pi based projects.
I’m sure you can take this even further. I used to run a production IRC server on a €15 TP-link plug router. Even after uninstalling the whole OpenWrt userland, I still couldn’t fit the ircd binary on the flash memory, so I wrote a script to mount an nfs share at boot and run ngircd
from there. It ran for about a year with tens of users on an active IRC network. There was still some spare memory so I also used it to host my personal website with uhttpd
:)
If an early-2010s, supercheap MIPS SoC can do that, imagine what modern IOT devices can do. Running IRCd on your fridge, washing machine, or heated blanket is almost certainly possible - it is such a lightweight protocol