Home » Technology » Battery-free GameBoy runs unlimited on solar energy and pressure (video) – News

Battery-free GameBoy runs unlimited on solar energy and pressure (video) – News

Scientists from TU Delft and Northwestern University have developed an experimental GameBoy that runs endlessly on solar energy and the energy that is generated when the buttons are pressed. A step towards battery-free consumer electronics and IoT.

Playing on the Engage is far from ideal, as the screen is tiny and the device shuts down a few times per minute to save power. However, the creation shows that battery-free IoT is possible.

Intermittent computing is all about resilience. Thanks to the rapid developments in this field, billions of low-power Internet of Things devices will be able to do without a battery in the future. They gradually extract their energy from the environment and, despite failing up to a hundred times per second, will perform their tasks properly. This presents quite a few challenges such as accurate memory management and accurate elapsed time tracking. Until now it has been used successfully in small sensors for scientific use.

In a first exploratory step towards consumer applications, the researchers created a battery-free and fail-safe clone of the 8-bit Nintendo Game Boy, one of the most popular portable gaming consoles ever made. Their energy-conscious gaming platform Engage is the shape and size of the original Game Boy, with some solar panels on the front. By pressing the buttons, the user is a second source of energy. The platform emulates the original Game Boy processor. While this requires quite a bit of computing power and therefore extra energy, it allows any popular retro game to be played right from the original cartridge.

Get rid of traditional savegame files

In order to achieve acceptable playtime between the times the device fails, the researchers had to redesign the system’s hardware and software from the ground up so that it was both energy-conscious and energy-efficient. They have also developed a new technique to write the active state of the system to permanent memory as efficiently as possible, and back again as soon as there is enough energy to continue playing. The savegames from traditional game platforms are therefore redundant because the player continues to play from the exact moment the device went out – even if this is in the middle of a jump during a platform game like Super Mario Land.

Lights on, sound off

On a not too cloudy day, and for games where you as a user have reasonable control over the buttons, the game interruptions are limited to less than one second for every ten seconds of play. The researchers find this acceptable for some games – including Chess, Solitaire and Tetris – but certainly not for all (action) games. With less light, the user experience also deteriorates. The fact that the games have no sound is a limitation that prevents you from being completely absorbed in them. ‘It is an open research question how you can still enjoy sound despite regular outages,’ says Jasper de Winkel, one of the researchers.

Raise awareness

There is still a long way to go before the state-of-the-art portable game consoles as we know them today can do without a battery. The ENGAGE gaming platform is a first step in that direction. Of course it is a nice gadget, but it has mainly been developed to draw attention to the many open questions that, besides sound, still exist when applying intermittent computing in the domain of continuous interaction with the user. For example, the platform can play a role in investigating the interactivity between humans and intermittent systems. However, the main motive for the battery-free Game Boy is to reduce our dependence on batteries. Batteries are expensive, dangerous for the environment, and they eventually need to be replaced to prevent entire devices from ending up in a dump. Gaming reduces stress and boredom in people, intermittent computing reduces the environmental impact of gaming.


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