Researchers power an ARM processor for a year using algae | Hacker News Reader

Researchers power an ARM processor for a year using algae

uk.pcmag.com

83 pointselorant18 comments

least useful possible link for the material

abstract/purchasing link: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/EE/D2EE0...

university press release: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-create-reliab...

not clear what the clock rate of the M0 was, or the actual power consumption. clocked low enough, you could run one of those off of happy thoughts.

I hear ya, and I agree.

But it does have potential for better use cases with research and investment.

I wouldn't expect anything like this to power a high end laptop anytime soon (at least not at the rate Intel is becoming power efficient).

Still, will review in more detail this weekend

I'm not sure if you joke.

You say we could run processors just by the energy radiated from the brain?

... brainwaves?

It's a joke, but these processors are extremely low power. A coin cell can power them for years (depending on what it's doing)

it was a joke, but you could probably do thermal energy harvesting of the heat lost from somebody's head and power one. they'd just have to wear a silly hat all the time.

From the paper: "Throughout the test, the Arm Cortex-M0+ processor drew an average current from the compact Al-BPV of 1.4 ± 0.4 µA with a voltage of 0.72 ± 0.14 V".

So a grand total of 31J of energy over the course of a year, or about 1% of the energy in a typical coin cell.

Yeah but think how much algae there is in the sea! With only a few million dollars of investment we might be able to power a whole house, or at least a large shed.

Yes, you are right, knowing the clock rate and duty cycle would be interesting to know. And knowing what the MCU is actually doing. Powering an MCU from a lemon or potato is nothing new and has been done with more than 30 year old MCU's, implementing clock's etc.

More challenging is probably to power a complete system, i.e. everything around the MCU, like driving Ethernet or WiFi or BT as well as some analog sensors and the like. Embedded MCU's do not require much and if you can spread out the computing needs over time, no big deal.

Look at Casio watches and the like which you can run for 10 years and they provide quite some features. It's okay as long as it is features that stay within the MCU/Display realm. Now, the watches which provide BT, GPS, different sensors etc kind of suck in this regard.

cf the story of the first ARM dev board running off leakage without any direct current.

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_o...

“The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."

This is a trick a lot of ICs are quite good at: because of the protection diodes on the inputs and outputs of most chips, voltage on the pins will also pull the internal power of the chip up if the power pins are not energised. A lot of chips will run quite happily like this until either all the IO pins supplying power go low or the IC draws enough current to damage the diodes (which aren't generally designed to continously conduct). I have on one occasion had a power IC (stepper motor driver) manage the same trick for a few minutes, which was very unusual and made debugging a lot harder (because of course the power pins are connected, it was running just a few minutes ago!)

Repost? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31375145#31386909

Yeap. Didn't saw the initial one though, and the link is different so it passed through.

Whats the interface between algae and electronics? The whole thing is poor on details.

Wait for the 3nm RISC-V low power chips... algae power free from toxic IP.

That chip will more than likely be designed by the Chinese so still arguably toxic. Pick your poison.

like https://www.sifive.com ?

The only way China has a chance on this ground is to go 100% open source implementation. If the western world can check the "blue print" and that the "blue print" on the chip is the "same", we could expect enough trust to roll all together.

This would be an improvement because current design of western chips has just 0-trust. ZERO.

Basically, we would need an alliance of the good guys from asia with the good guys from the "western" world. Should not be surprised if this does not work, coze it is beyond "hard" (not the mention the meddling of the "bad" guys from both sides).

RISC-V de-facto worldwide standard would help other regions to setup their "silicium" industry (africa/middle east/India/etc).

RIP the ocean

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