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Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

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Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#121

Post by jetbooster »

hbn wrote: post #110

It's a neat proof-of-concept, but the video gets a little optimistic and hand-wavey about how practical this could actually ever be. "Right now we have interruptions, but[...] that interruption amount is going to continually decrease as we make these systems better and more energy-efficient." Is that really the case? The limiting factor here is not just the efficiency of harvesting energy. The energy being harvested…

Without concentrating the sunlight, the max efficiency of a solar panel is about 68% conversion. With 1kW/m², and a solar panel the size of a 0.01m² phone (6.1 inch, 16:9) that's 6.8W to play with, at the theoretical maximum.

A quick check states a Raspberry Pi 4B at 100% CPU draws 6.4W, so in perfect conditions with a perfect panel, it's just about approaching feasible to run a chip on a phone sized panel.

However a Gameboy is much simpler than a Pi. It seems the Gameboy draws about 70-80mA@1.5V, or 0.1W, which is very impressive. I would say that would 100% be physically feasible to power with a gameboy sized solar panel in our lifetime.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#122

Post by psychphysic »

> 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.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#123

Post by flir »

flir wrote: post #95
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.…

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)

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#124

Post by testmasterflex »

seedboot wrote: post #119
testmasterflex wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

now use that energy to mine bitcoin and you'll be rolling in ~~money~~ decimal places before you know it!

A big ass inductor sucking up all phone batteries from the whole neighbourhood. On it.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#125

Post by testmasterflex »

rexreed wrote: post #114
testmasterflex wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to make that as well or find a source for it. Curious as to costs to manufacture and ease of reproducibility. Any tips / pointers / guides?

Can’t find the tutorial I used but here is one https://reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/efz9xf/my_nfc_powe...

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#126

Post by pqb »

Aachen wrote: post #97
sbierwagen wrote: post #38

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...

Neither lists a price, and it seems the former has a minimum quantity of "5,000" which I take to mean 5'000 but might be localised to mean 5, you never know

The Mouser website says 5000, not 5, unfortunately. Do you know if there is a retailer that sells them in smaller quantities (like <100)?

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#127

Post by LeifCarrotson »

hbn wrote: post #110

It's a neat proof-of-concept, but the video gets a little optimistic and hand-wavey about how practical this could actually ever be. "Right now we have interruptions, but[...] that interruption amount is going to continually decrease as we make these systems better and more energy-efficient." Is that really the case? The limiting factor here is not just the efficiency of harvesting energy. The energy being harvested…

The efficient processor they've chosen requires on the order of 20 microamps per megahertz at 1.8V to run code out of Flash, or 1.7 milliwatts of power. It draws only about 0.004 milliwatts in deep sleep, and takes less than a microsecond to enter and exit deep sleep.

Their energy-harvesting switches produce 0.33 milliwatt-seconds when pressed or released.

So you want to be efficient and enter deep sleep whenever possible. If you can have a duty cycle that looks like "Take sensor reading and run computation when button is pressed or when timer elapses, transmit over BLE, update e-ink display, or whatever our device does, then go back to sleep after 2 ms" that's easy - at even absurdly fast update rates of ~20 Hz, you're only using a 4% duty cycle and drawing an average of just 0.07 mW, requiring one button press every 10 seconds or so.

If you've got 3 button clicks per second, you can stay active all the time. But neither a 3 Hz button-press rate, nor a non-sleep-using firmware are reasonable. Of course, when you're bringing in a full ~10 mW of power continuously from the solar panels, the buttons are kind of a nice-to-have, you'd have to mash them at crazy rates to even equal the panels.

They're not even close to the potential efficiency of the processor - they're running an emulator for goodness' sake, which was almost certainly not designed with power saving in mind. If they started from the ground up reverse-engineering the Gameboy functions with the goal of maximizing power efficiency, yes, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that they could run continuously.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#128

Post by joshspankit »

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…

I operate at higher levels of abstraction, so forgive if this is a wild suggestion, but would a FPGA work here to enable creating a low-power “hardware” emulator?

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#129

Post by initramfs »

logicallee wrote: post #78

This is an incredibly important project under the new reality that Russia can cause war and havoc at any time and in any state. If they can do it in a Europe that has basically been at peace for 70 years, and facing massive worldwide opposition and direct opposition from the United States in the form of aid, weapons, and people, then they can do it anywhere, even in the continental United States. No place is safe und…

I wrote about that idea a few months ago, and covered the solar gameboy too: https://iotmote.substack.com/p/remaking-the-nokia-6110-and-p...

In 2011, Intel demonstrated a solar powered Pentium chip- they remade the 1994 Pentium it on 32nm. But it was a demo only. The reason it's been so "demo" for over 10 years is because no one thinks solar is possible to run anything portable, but no one questions why so much investment is focused on the latest graphics cards and AI chips like the A100. If there was more consumer demand, you'd see it released yesterday. The solar calculator in 1978 was far more advanced for its time, but now you have most people laughing at such an idea for a few hundred thousand more transistors. Sad.

Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)

#130

Post by initramfs »

neogodless wrote: post #109
diceduckmonk wrote: post #58

> 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, and some bugs may prevent some games from loading some parts. This bit seems a little disingenuous.

If they were selling you an emulator, I'd agree. But they're not advertising the capabilities of the emulator so much as telling you what to expect if you take this project on. In theory, all games should work, but emulators can be imperfect, so know what to expect.

Yeah, they are educators, not commercial developers. They encourage others to fork it. I began organizing a theoretical framework for a solar powered laptop 2 years ago: https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-libre-autarkic-laptop
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