Engineers Design Battery-Free Game Boy Powered by Button-Mashing and Sunlight
Researchers created an energy-harvesting, interactive device that looks and feels like a retro 8-bit Nintendo Game Boy.
When it was launched back in 1989, Nintendo’s Game Boy sparked a revolution with portable, handheld gaming consoles. The Atari Lynx, TurboExpress, Bitcorp Gamate, and Sega Game Gear soon followed, and new, more advanced consoles have continued to hit the market to this day. While today’s handheld platforms use rechargeable power cells, early consoles like the Game Boy seemingly chewed through an almost endless supply of AA batteries when playing games.
Researchers from Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology are looking to solve that problem by taking the battery out of the power equation altogether and replacing it with sunlight and kinetic energy. The Engage mobile gaming device looks similar to the Game Boy but was designed as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the possibilities of utilizing renewable energy sources to power a portable game console. A Game Boy it isn’t though, as the Engage is thicker, its display is much smaller, and it uses emulation to run games, although it can play Game Boy cartridges as well.
The Engage system derives its power from solar panels affixed to its lower body, plus kinetic energy derived from button pressing and D-pad use. The platform uses what’s known as “intermittent computing,” an energy harvesting technique that supplies small amounts of power over an “always-on” state. The catch is that the technique only allows for 10-seconds of gaming, and there is no sound, but the engineers have incorporated what they term as “checkpointing” games so that players can resume the game where they left off.
The trick now is to find a way for the console to resume gaming after the 10-second mark so that it’s instantaneous so that players don’t notice the switch. The team has no desire to market the Engage (and there is no point), as it’s meant to be a thought-provoking device to see if renewable energy can be sustained in next-gen portable consoles.
Instead of solar, they might want to look into sweaty hands as a power source!