
The first battery-free Game Boy wants to power a gaming revolution - Andrex
https://www.cnet.com/features/the-first-battery-free-game-boy-wants-to-power-a-gaming-revolution/
======
stinos
For the first time in like 20 years I played on a Game Boy just a couple of
months ago after finding my old box with handhelds (also had quite some
Game&Watch titles, but who has LR44 batteries these days..). Still fun.
Unfortunately my 'Game Boy Oscilloscope' cartridge was missing, that was a
pretty cool thing actually. Reminder of an era when things were different, but
not necessarily worse. Probably I'll think the same of this decade 20 years in
the future, but it's sometimes easy to foget how fast things can advance and
holding an older piece of hardware always reminds me of that.

More on topic: the comment wrt batteries in the article is spot on. So common,
yet so many problems with it. For that exact reason we have a kitchen scale
driven by a small dynamo for generating power. No more empty batteries right
when you need it. No more despair when the batteries it needs are not the type
you have lying around. No more auto-off in the middle of weighing (cannot
believe how many scales are plagued by that - or did I just get unlucky?).
Just spin the wheel a couple of times and it goes on for minutes. Really
hoping the thing lasts a lifetime; that's a good general rule for how tools
should be actually: do one thing, do it good, and last forever.

Anyway: too bad this isn't up for sale, would make a nice gift for instance.
But good to see there's still R&D being done in the direction of not requiring
batteries, combining a couple of sources is perhaps the novelty here.

~~~
war1025
> For that exact reason we have a kitchen scale driven by a small dynamo for
> generating power. No more empty batteries right when you need it.

That's interesting. Mind linking to it?

We've had a kitchen scale for about five years now, and I find myself becoming
ever more dependent on it. They are just an amazing little piece of equipment
that makes cooking so much easier.

And they do seem to die without warning, which is maddening.

I've started keeping more button cell batteries on hand exactly because of
that situation.

~~~
KMnO4
Even better, why not use a mechanical scale? Digital is sure easier to read
(plus you get neat features like tare and unit conversion), but a plain old
mechanical force measure doesn't require batteries _at all_.

~~~
war1025
I haven't ever seen a mechanical kitchen scale that has any amount of
capacity.

And they also tend to be much larger and bulkier than a digital scale.

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KMnO4
Nothing is said about the hardware (which will be posted Sept 12), but I
wonder what processor they're using. There have been a lot of advances in
lower power processors over these last years.

I was once at a conference where Atmel was demoing their SAM L21 board by
transmitting FM radio to a nearby radio receiver using the heat generated by
your hand.

I went home and purchased a board and found it amazing. 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+
that consumed < 35µA/MHz [0]. You could run an IOT device for years on a coin
cell!

Recently someone on HN mentioned the Ambiq Apollo3, which is even more
incredible with up to 96MHz and less than 6 (yes, SIX) µA/MHz. [1]. Absolutely
mind blowing.

That said, the biggest reason why I think new processors aren't used often is
their support/documentation. AVR processors are pretty bad in a lot of ways
(cost, performance, power consumption, etc) but you'll be hard pressed to find
a problem which hasn't already been solved by the millions of Arduino users.
Good luck troubleshooting your obscure interrupt issues with that one
Microchip processor that only 10 people use.

[0]: [https://www.microchip.com/design-
centers/32-bit/sam-32-bit-m...](https://www.microchip.com/design-
centers/32-bit/sam-32-bit-mcus/sam-l-mcus)

[1]: [https://www.fujitsu.com/uk/about/resources/news/press-
releas...](https://www.fujitsu.com/uk/about/resources/news/press-
releases/2018/apollo3-blue-wireless-ulp-mcu.html)

~~~
danbolt
I was wondering the same, especially since the Game Boy's Z80-esque processor
was designed for minimal power consumption even at the time of the handheld's
launch. I think it's outside the intent of the prototype, but I do wonder if
avoiding an emulator would give more power savings.

~~~
Andrex
There's probably heaps of patents involved, including those from partners
(mostly Sharp?), but my dream is that one day Nintendo fully opens the Game
Boy for use as an educational platform similar to Raspberry Pi. Imagine
widespread tinkering in robotics classes.

There's probably less than a 1% chance of it ever happening, but man, I wish
someone would at least float the idea to the NCL higher-ups in an interview or
something.

~~~
danbolt
I think it'd be a nice platform to teach assembly to university students as
well, given the hardware is so ubiquitous, straightforward, and fun.

------
danbolt
> The team didn't trial the 1,000-plus titles released for the Game Boy, but
> some of the biggest titles -- like Pokemon Blue -- have "sadistically huge"
> memory and don't require constant button pressing. That's a problem.

I'm curious if the emulator the authors are using loads the entire ROM into
the computer's memory before running. The Game Boy traditionally has a 16-bit
address space; games that had a larger amount of data would include
specialized hardware that allowed addresses 0x4000-0x7FFF to be re-assignable.
[1][2] Tetris or Tobu Tobu Girl [3] fit inside the initial space without
swapping, meanwhile something larger like Zelda switches banks.

[1]
[https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Bank_Controllers](https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Bank_Controllers)

[2]
[https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Map](https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Map)

[3]
[https://tangramgames.dk/tobutobugirl/](https://tangramgames.dk/tobutobugirl/)

------
interestica
>Beside the absence of a battery slot on the back, the device looks exactly
like Nintendo's revolutionary handheld.

Does it?

~~~
falcolas
It's a prototype (and thus exceptionally rough) but it is remarkably similar
to the original Gameboy IMO.

~~~
interestica
I absolutely agree. But, saying it looks 'exactly' alike is just such a
stretch.

------
yeahdef
I found this really interesting to read. It's really cool that they use the
mechanical press of the buttons to generate energy. I had never thought of
that before. However when you think about those old longpress ratchet
flashlights - that was the same concept.

~~~
jerrysievert
philips hue buttons/switches power via the press of the buttons to transmit
the commands to the hue base station.

[https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-tap-
switch/046677473...](https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-tap-
switch/046677473365)

> _The Hue Tap smart light switch is powered by kinetic energy, which means
> that when you press the light switch you generate sufficient energy ..._

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delgaudm
I wonder if harvesting energy from ambient radio waves would help ... or is
that type of energy harvesting philosophically off-limits to the project, as
you're just offloading the carbon footprint / energy source down the line?

~~~
MrEldritch
the energy flux available in ambient radio waves passing through something the
size of a handheld is _microscopic_ , pretty much.

------
jdalgetty
Hopefully they can figure out how to make this work with sound!

~~~
klyrs
So you can power your handheld by shouting at it?

~~~
gnabgib
I'm still yelling at my coffee[0] to warm it up.. 1 year, 7 months, 26 days,
20.5 hours didn't seem _that_ long

[0]: [https://www.physicscentral.com/explore/poster-
coffee.cfm](https://www.physicscentral.com/explore/poster-coffee.cfm)

