![]() ![]() We wouldn’t consider this terribly practical from a gaming standpoint, but like the solar harvesting handheld game we covered last year, it’s an interesting demonstration of how even a minuscule amount of power can be put to work for intermittent applications. After waiting two long months to switch the game on this time, he was able to play for nearly an hour before his homebrew nuclear energy source was depleted. His best guess is that he got a bad batch of thin-film batteries, but since he could no longer find the exact part number he used originally, he had to design a whole new PCB for the second attempt. Unfortunately, after waiting the prescribed amount of time, he got only a few seconds of runtime out of his hacked together power source. Some quick math told that a week of charging should build up enough of a charge to power a knock-off handheld Tetris game for about 10 minutes. The panels are then used to charge a bank of thin-film solid state batteries, which are notable for their exceptionally low self-discharge rate. Isolated from any outside light, power produced by the panels is the result of the weak green glow given off by the tube’s phosphorus coating as it gets bombarded with electrons. But as demonstrates in his latest video, you can eke some real-world use out of such a cell by storing up its power over a long enough period.Īs with previous projects we’ve seen, builds his cell by sandwiching an array of keychain-sized tritium tubes between two solar panels. Only problem is that the power produced, measured in a few microwatts, isn’t enough to do much with. The idea of a tritium power cell is pretty straightforward: stick enough of the tiny glowing tubes to a photovoltaic panel and your DIY “nuclear battery” will generate energy for the next decade or so. Posted in Parts Tagged battery, energy harvesting, solid-state battery We’d be particularly interested to learn about their temperature sensitivity when it comes to soldering, as we’ve taken to heart the warnings about soldering to more traditional lithium cells. For now they have some evaluation kits on offer, and unless we missed something, no full data sheet. ![]() The solid state chemistry should provide a long life and lack of leaks. These devices are most likely to be found in applications such as remote wireless sensors, where they can store the energy from a small solar cell or similar to produce the burst of power required to transmit a packet of data as well as the tiny current required to keep things ticking over. These come in a range of capacities from 0.1 mAh to 0.5 mAh, and in a 3.2 by 2.5 mm package look very much like any other slightly larger SMD chip component. The French company ITEN may have an answer for designers of micro-power devices though, in the form of a range of tiny surface-mount solid-state rechargeable lithium batteries. But they’re still pretty big, and they’re hardly the most stable power storage solution. We’re used to some pretty small batteries in miniaturized electronics, thanks to the manufacture of lithium-polymer pouch cells. Not bad for a topic that so often gets taken for granted.Ĭontinue reading “Battery Engineering Hack Chat Gets Charged Up” → Posted in Engineering, Hackaday Columns, Slider Tagged battery, Betavoltaic, energy storage, fuel cell, Hack Chat, solid-state battery, supercapacitor Our last Hack Chat of 2022 ended up being one of the longest in recent memory, with the conversation starting over an hour before the scheduled kickoff and running another half hour beyond when emcee Dan Maloney officially made his closing remarks. It’s these questions, and more, that made up this week’s Battery Engineering Hack Chat with Dave Sopchak. What’s the chemical process that allows them to work? For that matter, what even is a battery in the first place? In fact, there’s an excellent chance the device your reading this on is currently running on battery power, or at least, is capable of it. ![]() But today, high-capacity batteries have become part and parcel to our increasingly digital lifestyle. Turn the clock back a couple of decades, and the only time the average person would have given much thought to batteries was when the power would go out, and they suddenly needed to juice up their flashlight or portable radio. ![]()
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