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Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

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Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#131

Post by initramfs »

psychphysic wrote: post #122

> Can ENGAGE play all Gameboy games? > Yes! It is running a custom emulator which allows it to impersonate the Game Boy and play any Game Boy game (not the Color versions though). That said, just like with any emulator, not every title may work Yes! Proceeds to explain no.

It completely works. The choice of implementing an intermittent design for 2020, was reasonable. For 2022, it's questionable: https://protean.systems/ There are lithium ion capacitors that can run a game continouously for hours since they are battery-like https://www.tindie.com/products/jaspersikken/solar-harvestin... and don't require complicated power management systems. If this were for simple SMS and phone texting, it could run for enough time to not need to shut off every 10 seconds. But the very short capacitor design requires using very exotic FRAM. I think if enough optimizations are made, one run a tiny linux with a conventional filesystem: https://tiny.slitaz.org/

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#132

Post by deelowe »

byhemechi wrote: post #92
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty sure @userbinator is talking about taking the exact same circuit but making it on something like TSMC's 4nm process, rather than an emulator running on a general purpose processor (i.e. CPU)

You'd need to somehow address the SRAM potentially losing it's memory during power loss events.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#133

Post by mrguyorama »

anthk wrote: post #107
Shish2k wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original Gameboy ran on two AA batteries for 12-20 hours (depending on whether the light was on) I wonder if you googled for this? Googling for “original gameboy battery life” gives nearly this exact quote, but then reading the wikipedia article that it came from reveals that this is talking about the Gameboy Light (1998 - arguably “the original hardware with modern technology to reduce energy consumption”). I…

No one but Japan got the GB light. Everyone had either the GB and many more people had the GB Pocket because of Pokémon.

The gameboy color also ran on two AAs and had long battery life and slightly better specs

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#134

Post by initramfs »

bee_rider wrote: post #113
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

Seems region-specific. The sun is more reliable in some places. Harvesting from button pushes is almost completely reliable (may have some accessibility concerns, though, I guess?)

I can power the same processor with a lightbulb https://hackaday.io/project/177716/gallery#96cfdbf5cc550d520...

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#135

Post by mrguyorama »

flir wrote: post #123
flir wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an urban legend in the UK about a radio station having a dead spot in their signal. They send the boffins out to figure out what's going on, and they eventually track down someone who has filled his attic with coils of baling wire and is running his house lights off the radio station. (Yes, I know all the practical objections. It's an urban legend. I've seen variations involving BBC radio, TV broadcasts, subm…

Oh - and a story that actually happened, in a similar vein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

The cool thing about The Thing is that it's not really an energy harvesting device, and has no active components. It is a purely passive modulator of a signal being transferred over the air!

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#136

Post by oceanplexian »

I was a little let down that the solution to not having batteries was just a few solar cells. If you're looking for something along the same theme, it's not a "Game Boy" but a Youtuber built a handheld powered by radioactive tritium. https://hackaday.com/2021/07/14/tetris-handheld-powered-by-t...

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#137

Post by vanderZwan »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #112
vanderZwan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the idea of a research project is to find out what is worth doing and what isn't. Do shitty, hard to press buttons actually help? Or would putting just a tiny bit larger solar cells help a lot more. If you're in complete darkness, can you actually press enough buttons to make it playable there too? There have been many, many really shitty solar projects in the last year, some wasting millions of dollars and euros…

So the questions in your first paragraph are mostly answered by the paper.

And your second paragraph feels a bit like an unfair comparison to me. This is a first attempt at seeing if this concept is even remotely feasible, and it uses off-the-shelf parts for that. It's not a company with a lot of money and resources invested in it that produces mediocre final products where the embodied energy of the solar panels is so much more than any energy it saves over its life-time that it's less green than something that runs on batteries. Which, yes, are an annoying feature of modern greenwashing. But this research project is not that.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#138

Post by bee_rider »

initramfs wrote: post #134
bee_rider wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems region-specific. The sun is more reliable in some places. Harvesting from button pushes is almost completely reliable (may have some accessibility concerns, though, I guess?)

I can power the same processor with a lightbulb https://hackaday.io/project/177716/gallery#96cfdbf5cc550d520...

That is pretty cool. Although, it seems like a fairly inefficient way of connecting to the grid.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#139

Post by calebegg »

oceanplexian wrote: post #136

I was a little let down that the solution to not having batteries was just a few solar cells. If you're looking for something along the same theme, it's not a "Game Boy" but a Youtuber built a handheld powered by radioactive tritium. https://hackaday.com/2021/07/14/tetris-handheld-powered-by-t...

(to be fair, it also gets power from the buttons)

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#140

Post by initramfs »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #89
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.

I agree, but since it was designed as a demo, it was a lot quicker to find an existing emulator: https://mikrocontroller.bplaced.net/wordpress/?page_id=1290 and rewrite it for a related Cortex M4 processor.

FYI, I contacted the group to express interest over 2 years ago and never got a response. They are working on a new project with more advanced graphics https://www.techradar.com/features/the-quest-for-the-solar-p...

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