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Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

freethegameboy.info

41–50 of 170 posts

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#41

Oddly enough, the "energy harvesting switches" they used in this are commercial products! https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/zf-electronics/AF... https://switches-sensors.zf.com/us/product/energy-harvesting...

Love this kind of stuff.

I made this slim PCB a few years ago with a super tiny NFC chip on it that can harvest energy from NFC:

https://youtu.be/_BSfO9LAIqg

Made it into a business card as you can see.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#42
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries That's how passive RFID tags work. The tag has a tiny little computer, and you hold it near a thing that emits an electric field that energizes it.

I think the poster wants this to work without the “you hold it near a thing” part.

But it still works almost the same way. You hold it near a thing to get energy is mostly required because it works with very little power, let's say some milliwatts. Whereas old AM stations where sending in the range of megawatts.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#43

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?

Are black holes allowed?

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#45

Beautiful, is a dream to have a device that you can forget about charge it and "range anxiety", I hope it will be implemented at least in smartwatch in the next years.

I know there are mechanical energy harvesting watches; I imagine making a similar smartwatch would be much harder with the higher energy requirement. And the issue with solar panels is the tendency for people to wear long sleeves, stay indoors, sleep, etc.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#46

Looks like they used an existing emulator and this was mostly a hardware and memory integrity experiment. I’d love to see this approached from the perspective of “how clever can we get with the emulator itself to save power?” When I wrote mine, something I ran into was realizing that often the CPU and PPU are just doing the same thing over and over and over. If only I could cache all that work. For example, you don’t…

That code was a joy to read, that is an example of comments done right. Such a pleasure to see comments that actually describe the intent of a function rather than stepping through the code, although doing it well is definitely much harder work.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#47
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trick is negotiation. Start by trying to bum a cigarette off mom. Then settle for using the cigy lighter for your gameboy

It looks like we're talking about parents who did not realize on their own that keeping the Game Boy powered up helps keep the kid in the back of the car quiet, so I don't know if they would have been open to negotiation.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#49
post #10

Looks like they used an existing emulator and this was mostly a hardware and memory integrity experiment. I’d love to see this approached from the perspective of “how clever can we get with the emulator itself to save power?” When I wrote mine, something I ran into was realizing that often the CPU and PPU are just doing the same thing over and over and over. If only I could cache all that work. For example, you don’t…

That was a pleasure to read through. Made me think of literate code.

Am I the only one that thinks this is a normal level of comments? Ok maybe slightly more than I would normally do... But if I was reading it my thought would be "thank god they wrote comments" not "they commented the heck out of this!"

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trick is negotiation. Start by trying to bum a cigarette off mom. Then settle for using the cigy lighter for your gameboy

Our son does this when negotiating his Minecraft screen-time allowance; we call it "creeper commitment".
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