To enable this, we equipped our battery-free console with an external dedicated FRAM IC. A fast, byte addressable non-volaitile memory is crucial to enable saving and restoring state in spite of power failures. Only slow and energy-expensive FLASH memory is present. N o ARM MCUs we are aware of contain on-chip fast, byte-addressable non-volatile memory-such as FRAM-serving as a main memory. The platform is built around an ARM Microcontroller (MCU) architecture, a departure from classic intermittent computing devices using Texas Instruments MSP430FRxxxx MCUs. In this project we focus specifically on this ignored part of the battery-free device ecosystem, mobile gaming, and use this application to elucidate the essential challenges that must be explored to get us to a future where reactive and user facing applications can also be battery-free. This is a critical gap in the research around battery-free devices, as these types of reactive, interactive, and screen-focused systems are a significant portion of the current and anticipated smart systems.

Energy can be generated by mashing buttons while gaming, and readily available energy from sunlight is all around us, so why not use this energy for battery-free mobile gaming! Significant challenges in software resiliency and efficiency, hardware operation and energy usage first need to be solved, but would represent a fundamental advancement over non-interactive (and not very fun) battery-free devices that currently exist.īattery-free devices can make phone calls, monitor greenhouses, even track eyes, but so far immersive interactive experiences without batteries have not been explored. This project originates from the question: can we game-on-the-go without batteries? Batteries add size, weight, bulk, cost and especially inconvenience because of constant recharging-to any device.

Press : CNET, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Hackaday, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, PCMag, The Register, Tech Times, Nintendo Life, Daily Mail, The Independent, r/gadgets, Naked Gaming, Seeker

Team : Jasper de Winkel, Vito Kortbeek, Josiah Hester, Przemysław Pawełczak

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