Sustainable GameBoy That Runs Forever On No-Batteries

Have you ever wished you had a device in which the battery never runs out, or have you ever wanted one day to put an end to all the sustainability issues caused by batteries landing up in landfills? Well, that possibility will soon be a reality with the new proof of concept that was developed by some engineers at Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. They were able to manufacture handheld sustainable game devices that can run without batteries, relying on solar energy and the key presses of the user.

 

Battery-free intermittent computing has long been an idea that has plagued researchers in the technology industry for a long time. With this sustainable device we will soon see an end to the costly and environmentally hazardous batteries that were used to power electronic devices like interactive games which end up in landfills. This device relies on energy from the sun which it attracts and also energy from the user when he presses some keys on the gamepad.

“It’s the first battery-free interactive sustainable device that harvests energy from user actions,” said Northwestern’s Josiah Hester, who co-led the research. “When you press a button, the device converts that energy into something that powers your gaming.”

On September 15, 2020 this team of engineers will present their sustainable game device virtually at the UbiComp 2020 conference.They promise that this is not a toy but the real thing,

So one may ask: how does this device function? This is an energy-aware gaming platform (ENGAGE) that was equipped with precisely the size and form factor of the original Gameboy. The screen has a set of solar panels that attracts and transforms energy from the Sun into its internal energy. Then another source of energy for the device comes from the button presses by the user. It is pertinent to note that an important component of the game device is that it impersonates the original Gameboy processor. While using a lot of computational power, impersonating the processor has the advantage of making it possible that any retro game can be played straight from the original cartridge.

There existed some challenges when the device is power switching. As it switches power from one source to the other the game device can experience loss of power. This problem was overcome when the engineers made the device to be energy aware as well as energy efficient so that the duration of the power failure will become inconsequential. A new technique was also developed to store the system state in non-volatile memory such that the overhead from power failures became minimal and the system could restore itself to previous state when power is restored. This makes it possible that the ‘save’ button which you can find on other devices does not exist as it is state aware and can make the game continue just from precisely where it stopped even if the player was in the course of completing an action.

It was discovered that on days where the sun shone heavily, or the clicking was moderate, interruptions could be ignored by the player. Yet the engineers have not gotten to where they desire the device to be, that is, to have non-interruptible states. But they are happy about one fact - this proof-of-concept shows that sustainable, environmentally-conscious devices that do not use hazardous batteries are possible in the near future.

“Sustainable gaming will become a reality, and we made a major step in that direction — by getting rid of the battery completely,” said TU Delft’s Przemyslaw Pawelczak, who co-led the research with Hester. “With our platform, we want to make a statement that it is possible to make a sustainable gaming system that brings fun and joy to the user.”

“Our work is the antithesis of the Internet of Things, which has many devices with batteries in them,” Hester said. “Those batteries eventually end up in the garbage. If they aren’t fully discharged, they can become hazardous. They are hard to recycle. We want to build devices that are more sustainable and can last for decades.”

You can watch Hester describing this sustainable device in the video below: