Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodleader | Hacker News Reader

I've worked in retail for an electronics store where we gradually changed over to those. They were from https://www.ses-imagotag.com/products/electronic-shelf-label... They even calimed to us 13 years batery life at an average of 1 refresh per day. They are pretty power efficient and we've had many devices that ran for years without an issue.

View on HN

That's around 5000 refreshes, being a bit charitable. If I'm playing cards, I might see that in a few days, as I'm going to be doing tens or hundreds of refreshes a day, rather than one.

If the cards are always on a table / special playing surface, they could be wirelessly charged during play.

Some variants use NFC power to drive the display update, so no batteries!

I didn't realize NFC could deliver enough power for that. I'll look into it.

The demos I saw of this were slow, on the order of 10 seconds to get enough power through.

aha! So there is a catch. Still worth checking out.

If you could store that power in a capacitor it might be fine.

Basically, only one change every ten seconds is probably workable, as long as you don't have a ten second latency when asking for a change.

I think it would really depends on what game you're playing. From what I gathered from the article it's not really meant to replace a standard deck of cards but more aimed towards board games. People that are serious about board gaming will usually have 1 session/week , sometimes but rarely more, often less. So I'm sure on average each card will get more than 7 refreshes/week but it will probably be in the acceptable range.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com