Or how about 999 additional computers? They could be really tiny ones, running some kind of operating system designed for putting inside small single purpose machines. You could also add a coloured light on the front of each one and a button that says "copy to NAS".
Or each SD-card-reader node could copy to its own hard drive (to free things up for another card) and asynchronously upload from there to the central unit... Or possibly send metadata/thumbnails first, and then alternate between sending specifically-requested content versus uploading the backlog.
I'd be interested to find out what sort of anti-islanding techniques they employ. Most inverters are relatively slow to detect grid failure, and if you pull the plug out quickly you might get a shock.
AS/NZ standards prohibit these sorts of systems. Even most models of Victron inverters are not "approved" for grid use without an approved external anti-islanding device, which also vary depending on which energy distributer your are connecting to. Apparently Victron got fed up with dealing with CEC and paying the annual fees to be approved.
How do you power them? I've used ESPHome previously to scrape my solar analytics for consumption in Home Assistant using $3 Wittycloud ESP8266's. But as yet I haven't found an elegant solution for powering them other than using a USB adapter. It would be nice to find an elegant battery solution for outside sensors.
You can buy off-the-shelf modules that take a lithium ion cell and provide charging, overcurrent and overdischarge protection; just search your Chinese online retailer of choice for "TP4056 module" and you will find plenty of them. There is a Hackaday article [1] that goes in depth on how to use them properly.
If you'd rather not wire it up yourself there are also ESP32 dev boards with built-in battery management functionality, such as the LoLin32 Lite and Sparkfun ESP32 Thing. I haven't had much luck with the former (possibly due to its lack of RF shielding) but the latter seems to be pretty solid. I think Adafruit sells similar boards as well.
The Olimux ESP32-POE / wESP32 boards have a proper ethernet connection and PoE support. Means you don't need to worry about wifi coverage or power as long as you can get an ethernet cable to it - and those are cheap & easy to find in ludicrous lengths for outdoor use.
ESPHome also has deep sleep support - so for some use cases you can just wake up every x minutes/hours, connect to wifi, do thing, back to sleep for x minutes. In deep sleep a decent ESP32 board (firebeetle or tinypico) will last for months on a small lithium cell. For a quick sensor, the whole wake up/read sensor/update HA/sleep again takes a second or so depending on wifi configuration.
Useful for something on a schedule like sprinklers or slow sensors (soil humidity or whatever).
You can also wake based on interrupts, which is good for stuff where you are using a low power external sensor that does interrupts (wake ESP up if humidity gets to x) or a GPIO switch (magnetic entry/float switch/etc etc).
Firebeetles and tinypicos both have cell connectors and onboard charging directly for lithium pouch cells. You could also get a cheapo solar power bank, although you'll want to do some research to make sure the relatively light load of an ESP32 will keep it powered on.
I second the Olimex ESP-POE boards. I use them for all my ESPhome projects as I'm a big fan of wired connectivity and having the ability to power them over PoE is awesome.
They also have a wide variety of sensors that connect with a ribbon cable (they call it uEXT) with no soldering required. Many of the sensors are supported by ESPHome.
Battery can be a problem as low power takes a lot more engineering than you’d imagine and being outdoors creates additional problems if you’re trying to use lithium chemistry cells when temps go below freezing.
I wonder if this approach still works with firmware tweaked drives. Anyone remember the "google" spec 320G Seagate drives from circa 2006? The ones with the pink epoxy"? IIRC they benchmarked with flat throughput across the whole platter. Rumours were they were custom spec drive that somehow made it in to the retail channel.
Reminds me of a similar story from a colleague regarding email an email that couldn't be sent with a specific subject. After much troubleshooting by L1/L2 techs it turned out to be a bit pattern error / broken ASIC in a core router/switch.
I've personally twice encountered similar issues, once with FTPS and another with HTTPS, both manifesting as strange cryptographic failures, but ultimately caused by broken network device somewhere in the path.
Reminds me of this PDF I created more than a decade ago from a Postscript implementation of the game of life. Seems it still works, but causes MacOS preview to crash. https://andrewcutler.net/docs/joke/life.pdf
It doesn't cause Preview to crash on Sonoma. FWIW, I can't see any animation, just the final state, while Firefox's PDF reader does show some animation. Skim has the same behaviour as Preview but doesn't show the grid.
The only thing keeping Apache alive today is the need to support .htaccess files for PHP apps like WordPress and the like. For every other use case there are better alternatives.
