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Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

freethegameboy.info

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Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#81

Post by Schroedingersat »

chillbill wrote: post #31

I appreciate the hackery aspect of this but I have very high levels of doubt that this path will amount to anything significant. Aside from that, it’s slightly annoying that they repeated a false premise (or at best half-truth) twice at the beginning and left a significant piece of how it works (it’ll turn on and off) till the middle. I think everyone knows that you can harvest solar power but the problem with it is…

It'll be boring dystopia shit that will spy on you and phone home with dull data like when and where you opened a packet of chips for marketers to sell to marketers so they can sell ads that get shown to robots. But this time without needing to contrive a reason for you to keep it charged.

Plastic packaging. Now with gallium arsenide!

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#82

Post by mk_stjames »

alex_duf wrote: post #53
0_____0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of AM radio being audible in non-electric structures, like an old hangar door. Some combination of geometry, metal surface condition (corrosion?), and proximity to a station.

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.

Lucille Ball very famously told a story on the Dick Cavett show about hearing radio transmissions in her tooth fillings in 1942 and it leading to the capture of a Japanese spy station. [0].

While the story seems a bit far fetched, having fillings act as diode rectification of an AM signal that is then conducted into sound via the jaw is completely real and has happened to many people, particularly moreso in the past when people more often had metal fillings and very powerful AM signals were more prominent.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Mhl42bu1s

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#84

Post by yftsui »

kilgnad wrote: post #2

This will be worth billions of dollars in a post war apocalypse when electricity no longer exists.

If electricity no longer exists, any electronic device will cease to function including this one.

If you mean power grid is all down, the biggest winner would be those crank style devices or generator installers.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#86

Post by airbreather »

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 used to build crystal sets that would have two receivers in - one to harvest power from the strongest local station and then a second one that would take some of that power to bias up the detector diaode or to even use a germanium transistor to amplify the audio.

The first receiver would be able to drive a loudspeaker through a transformer loud enough you could hear it across a quiet room, so some power there, but only milliwatts.

I have wondered if these days with the zero volt FETS if there would be enough power for a regenerative receiver, some kind of negative resistance version seems most likely.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#87

Post by alpaca128 »

once_inc wrote: post #57
jandrese wrote: post #22

I have to wonder just how much power they get out of those button presses. It seems like it must be such a tiny amount that it's hardly worth the effort.

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 ca…

Make the haptic feedback pleasant enough and implement it as a fidget toy somewhere on the back where the unoccupied fingers can spam it.

My previous mouse died because I loved the haptic feeling of the scrollwheel so much I wore it out. Might generate enough energy for a small gameboy-like device.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#88

Post by vanderZwan »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #59
vanderZwan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Aha, so a clever ploy to get you to practice reading and learn about taking care of your own needs? My apologies to your parents, I clearly underestimated them! :)

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#89

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Waterluvian wrote: post #7

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…

Instead of software emulation, why not hardware emulation? The original Gameboy ran on two AA batteries for 12-20 hours (depending on whether the light was on); I'd argue that rebuilding the original hardware with modern-day technologies could reduce that energy consumption by 90% or more.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#90

Post by Cthulhu_ »

IshKebab wrote: post #49
rapind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

It depends on the application, I wouldn't want this in the average webapp I build but most of that is nonspecific and low value code that will be replaced every five years or so.
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