Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

Even if it turns out to be useless, this was a research project. Testing if this is feasible in practice is part of the point. Although it is a bit odd that they don't show any stats on the main page.

I looked it up in the paper[0], section 5.2 discusses power consumption/generation and pasted it below (I hope all symbols survived the clipboard).

TL;DR: the buttons generate a very small difference in power generation relative to solar panels. HOWEVER, this still seems to be a significant difference in how quickly the battery drains. If solar panels generate 10.5 mW, and the buttons 0.5 mW, but the system requires 11.5 mW, then this doubles the up-time of the system. That would actually be quit a nice insight to share on the main project page IMO!

> We have measured ENGAGE’s power consumption, looking into overall power consumption whilst first measuring the consumption of MCU together with the FRAM and display. The MCU and FRAM combined consume 11.15 mW and the screen consumes 344.31 μW during game execution taking a ten second average. During idle time the screen only consumes 3.90 μW, resulting in a combined system average power consumption of 11.50 mW. As a comparison, the original Nintendo Game Boy consumes 232.08 mW during game execution, varying slightly per game and cartridge architecture. While not necessarily a useful or meaningful number, we conclude that our platform is more than 20 times more power-efficient than the original Nintendo Game Boy (representing normal technology advancement, but noting that ENGAGE is an emulator). The measurements were conducted using a Fluke 87V [33] multimeter and the X-NUCLEO-LPM01A [123] programmable power supply source with power consumption measurement capability

> Then, to give more insight in the energy harvesting on the ENGAGE platform we have measured the amount of energy the solar panels generate using a Fluke 87V [ 33 ] multimeter and compare this to the energy generated from the buttons. For the buttons we use the minimal energy generation figures from the specification of the harvester [ 153 , summary] as a worst case scenario3. Assuming that a single button press generates a minimum of 0.66 mJ and knowing the amount of button presses per game is specific to the game as per Table 1 , we can assume the buttons generate between 0.66 mJ for one press per second and 1.98 mJ for three presses per second. At 40 klx and 20 klx, the solar panels generated an average of 10.14 mW and 8.33 mW, respectively, i.e. less than the required system average power consumption of 11.50 mW. We can conclude that ENGAGE is mostly powered by solar panels and supplemented by the button presses although the button presses can significantly increase the on-time of the platform, as shown in Section 5.1

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411839

There's an anecdote of someone hearing voices, but it turned out to be AM radio.

They found out it was the metal in two cavity filling that made the teeth vibrate and transmitted sound to their ear.

Not sure if it's just an urban legend or legit, but I like that story.

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The more interesting take would be: can we build a handheld with a haptic input that generates more energy than mashing these buttons. I am reminded of an odd controller for one of the consoles in what I think was generation 1 or 2, which consisted of two parts that you could rotate opposite each other. Another is the 'powerball' concept of physically rotating something to a certain speed. I'm sure large companies can build a handheld that would generate enough energy because of a clever combination of gameplay and energy efficient harvesting inputs.

The parents realized I'd still quietly read without the gameboy, plus I'd already been given rechargeable batteries.