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Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

freethegameboy.info

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Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#21

Post by atahanacar »

StrangeATractor wrote: post #17
rom-antics wrote: post #4

When I was a kid I had a toy electronics kit and one of the circuits was an AM radio that worked without batteries. A normal radio station signal is strong enough to drive a pair of earbuds without any additional power. Since then I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries, maybe even a Game Boy. There's electromagnetic radiation in the air all around us.…

I heard a tale in the days of yore where a radio station was not getting the range promised by the laws of physics. When they did some investigating they found an engineer that lived next door to the tower was syphoning power from the radio waves as part of a home experiment. I'm not qualified to determine the plausibility of this, but I hope it's true.

Can you siphon power from the sun so other people can't get its radiation, without you covering the entire surface with something like a Dyson sphere?

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#24

Post by philistine »

atahanacar wrote: post #21
StrangeATractor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a tale in the days of yore where a radio station was not getting the range promised by the laws of physics. When they did some investigating they found an engineer that lived next door to the tower was syphoning power from the radio waves as part of a home experiment. I'm not qualified to determine the plausibility of this, but I hope it's true.

Can you siphon power from the sun so other people can't get its radiation, without you covering the entire surface with something like a Dyson sphere?

Mr. Burns managed to do it.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#25

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

rom-antics wrote: post #4

When I was a kid I had a toy electronics kit and one of the circuits was an AM radio that worked without batteries. A normal radio station signal is strong enough to drive a pair of earbuds without any additional power. Since then I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries, maybe even a Game Boy. There's electromagnetic radiation in the air all around us.…

You can power florescent light bulbs underneath high voltage power lines IIRC.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#26

Post by sublinear »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #16
8note wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a wall plug in for my game boy colour. That worked quite well because the grid's always been pretty reliable

Cars usually lacked wall plugs. You could get ones that plugged into the cigarette lighter, but my parents at least were unwilling to string a cable through the gear selector to the back seat.

I recall some vehicles, such as minivans, station wagons, and various "land yacht" 4-doors, having cigarette lighters in the back seats. That's what I used.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#27

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

userbinator wrote: post #5

I suspect actually reimplementing the original GameBoy SoC in a modern low-power process could provide a significant improvement over the inefficiency of an emulator.

I was under the impression that doing things directly in custom silicon was always more efficient than emulation (all other things held fixed) both from a performance and power consumption perspective. The problem of course is that it costs orders of magnitude more money to implement, to say nothing of the difficulty in designing/testing the thing.

It's basically the same progression we saw in bitcoin mining: Custom software on a general purpose CPUs, then on GPUs, then programmed on FPGAs, then actual ASICs that are straight up custom silicon to do nothing but check those hashes.

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