Ultra-low power consumption computer 'PotatoP' that runs without charging for up to 2 years



Norwegian software developer

Andreas Eriksen has developed a computer ' PotatoP ' with a battery that lasts up to 2 years depending on the usage environment.

PotatoP | Hackaday.io
https://hackaday.io/project/184340-potatop

Andreas Eriksen's PotatoP Is a Lisp-Powered Laptop with a Battery Life Measured in Years - Hackster.io
https://www.hackster.io/news/andreas-eriksen-s-potatop-is-a-lisp-powered-laptop-with-a-battery-life-measured-in-years-2f5d79653f24

PotatoP is equipped with a 12,000 mAh lithium-ion polymer battery, as well as a solar panel that converts sunlight into electricity. Due to its extremely low power consumption, it is said that it will operate for up to two years depending on the brightness of the surroundings.



The PotatoP motherboard uses SparkFun's '

Redboard Artemis ATP ', which runs 'PotatOS' programmed in 'uLisp', a programming language designed for microcontrollers.

The display uses Sharp's 4.4-inch monochrome display ' LS044Q7DH01 '. This display is made with an intermediate technology between electronic paper and conventional liquid crystal displays, and is characterized by no backlight and minimal power consumption. In addition, PowerFilm's ' LL200-2.4-75 ' is used for the solar panel, and ' PiJuice 12000mAh Battery ' is used for the battery.

You can see how PotatoP actually works in the following movie.

Programming my homebrew computer-YouTube


The prototype of PotatoP looks like this. Mr. Eriksen was developing with the goal of reducing the power consumption of PotatoP to 5 mW, but at the beginning it seems that he could not even hit letters with the keyboard.



As a result of repeated improvements, we succeeded in displaying characters on the screen. At this time, the current consumption is 6mA and the power consumption is about 22mW, which means that it can be used for about 83 days with one charge. After that, as a result of improving graphics and refresh rate problems, the current consumption drops to a maximum of 2mA.



One of the problems PotatoP had was that the microSD card used too much power. A typical microSD card requires up to 300mA to operate, which is tens of times more than the entire system combined and four times more than a solar panel can supply. For this reason, Mr. Eriksen purchased a special SD card '

Adafruit SPI Flash SD Card ' with a maximum current consumption of 30mA.



As a result of the improvement, it seems that the standby power has been successfully reduced to 2.64mW and 5mW when executing the uLisp code that draws fractals , but still the power jumps up to 16.4mW if you keep pressing all the arrow keys It seems that there was a design error. At the time of writing the article, Mr. Eriksen reviewed the design with the goal of `` reducing the power to 6 mW or less during use and approaching 0 during standby '', and ultimately wanted PotatoP to operate only with light. It seems that there is



in Hardware, Posted by log1p_kr