Spinning the Web

Hosting a website is not the ordeal it once was. These days, it is possible to spin up a virtual machine image in a cloud computing environment and go live in a matter of minutes. Self-hosting a low-traffic website from a machine on a home network is not much harder. Things certainly can get more complicated with load balancing, container orchestration, and so on, but the groundwork has already been laid, and it is largely a matter of following established practices to get up and running.

The same basic formula applies to almost all situations, so there is not much need to deviate from these principles. Well, unless you want to do something really unusual like host a website from a bike, that is. It would be hard to come up with a good reason why a website should be hosted from a bike — one of the great things about the internet is that physical location is not especially important. But artist and designer Jelle Reith understands that hacking is not always about necessity; sometimes it is about doing something just because you want to see if you can make it work.

Reith is currently on a long cycling tour around the world, so why not toss some hardware hacking into the mix and host a website from that bike? The software stack may be similar to that of a cloud-hosted website, but this setup does raise some new challenges. Powering the hardware and maintaining connectivity to the internet, in particular, had to be dealt with by Reith.

To squeeze the most computing power out of a tight energy budget, a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer was selected to do the hosting. An Arducam 64-megapixel camera was hooked up to the Raspberry Pi so that pictures of the cycling adventure can be shared on the website. The components were installed into a watertight Altinkaya enclosure, with a port cut in it to install a GoPro glass lens for the camera. A Sense HAT was installed to collect environmental parameters, and images are geotagged with coordinates captured by Reith’s phone.

A Forumslader V3 bicycle hub dynamo harvests energy from the spinning wheel and turns it into AC electricity. This is then converted into DC power for the onboard electronics. This system also provides enough juice to charge a phone, earbuds, and even a laptop. You have got to keep those modern conveniences even on a cycling trip!

Keeping the website connected to the internet was not as challenging as it might seem. Reith’s phone was used as a hotspot, and a virtual private server with a static IP forwarded all web requests to the Raspberry Pi — the IP of the Raspberry Pi changed frequently since it is on a cell network.

This architecture got the job done, but it is not without its limitations. First and foremost, the website will be offline where there is no cell coverage. Furthermore, there are limits to the amount of data that can be uploaded over these networks. And since the main point of this website is to serve up images of the cycling trip, that poses a real problem. Reith cheated just a bit and used a more traditional web host on the backend to serve up high-resolution images to get around this issue.

In the future, it would be interesting to see Reith explore other wireless transmission methods to improve uptime when cellular data is not available. That might also solve some of the issues with data limits in the process.

If cellular data is available, and the server is not completely overloaded with traffic, you can check out the website here.