Overview
The last time a major hurricane made landfall on the coast of South Carolina was on the night of September 21-22, 1989. Hurricane Hugo arrived in the days of the NSFNET, nearly 6 years before the modern Internet was fully commercialized in 1995. In the same year (1989), Intel announced the 486 CPU with a single core running at 20-25 MHz. Hard disk drives were still measured in the low tens of megabytes, RAM was measured in the KiB to low MiB range, and floppy disks were the still the standard way to install software.
Every hurricane to make landfall on the South Carolina coast since 1989 has done so at Category 1 intensity on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The strongest of these storms, Hurricane Matthew in 2016, had wind speeds of 85 mph and caused significant wind damage resulting in widespread power outages at and near CCU. These outages lasted a few days. A Category 4 storm like Hugo will once again visit our coastline sometime in the future. When it happens, power and communications systems will be out for weeks, and some core infrastructure will need to be rebuilt. Cell phone service will also be unavailable, potentially for extended periods of time in some areas.
Consider the computers and devices you own, and also think about the equipment most businesses use on a day-to-day basis. Our modern systems are designed on the assumption of endless power (either plugged into a wall outlet or readily charged when needed) and 24/7 network connectivity. What happens when neither of those things are available, perhaps for weeks on end?
Hurricanes are not the only threat that can disrupt our modern, connected way of life. Geopolitical events and cyberattacks can have potentially devastating consequences. Solar storms like the Carrington Event of 1859 have the potential to create global widespread electrical, communications, and satellite disruptions. Summertime thunderstorms and Bubba digging through a fiber optic line with a backhoe can create short-term disruptions.
The purpose of this project is to create a computer system that is compact enough to be portable yet simultaneously able to run indefinitely using a small number of solar panels and a battery. Inspiration for this project comes from the cyberdeck concept, albeit with some size and form factor trade-offs to accommodate a larger battery using a safer and more robust chemistry (lithium iron phosphate). Since the department is already using the Raspberry Pi 5 in several courses, the initial design uses this single-board computer.
Related Projects and Research
This project is to create and test hardware components, ultimately resulting in a reproducible build that others could implement or extend. This system will require a software stack, which will be a Linux-based environment that will reuse components from the Private Desktop Environment set of projects. We will need to include offline copies of important references, maps, and other services, so the rest of the Resilient, Off-Grid, and Sustainable Computing projects will also be necessary.
Although we could build this system entirely for emergency or backup use, we have grid power and Internet connectivity available most of the time. Instead of leaving this system lying around in a closet somewhere, it will also be designed to support normal operations during non-emergency conditions. For these use cases, the system will need to be able to go into the field to be used for scientific and engineering purposes. It will thus need to be able to run either from battery or from 12 volt power supplied by a boat or land vehicle, and it will need to be waterproof.