so that gray piece on the right is the solar collector, right? since it can go 2 years, what's to stop it from going forever? what if you added a 2nd collector on the left? how big would the solar panel need to be in order for it to run indefinitely?
Super job!
Replace the battery every few years and you're set. Rely upon mass production, standard part numbers and highly recyclable parts (lead acid wins at this).
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Lead Acid is particularly good at UPS style power usage patterns. It's very easy to perpetually trickle charge lead acid.
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If you're set on Li-ion, then use a standard 18650 cell, so you know that you'll always be able to buy a replacement. But given the attributes I see here, lead acid probably wins. So you have to replace a part every 3 years that costs $5 to $10, big whoop.
He reports that it's a "very complex electrochemical device".
The USPTO (?) has assigned the code H01M10/06 to lead-acid battery patents. https://patents.google.com/?q=(H01M10%2f06)&oq=(H01M10%2f06) finds 44'593 patents in this category. You don't need any of them to get a working lead-acid battery, but a significant subset of them are going to be helpful. Some are order-of-magnitude improvements.
But I'm a poor student of modern history. Just throwing out a guess for now.
But again, I'd say that Eastern European modern history is my weakest subject by far. I probably should avoid talking about this subject lol.
I do consider it effectively an apocalyptic kind of battery design. It was invented in the 1800s, its chemistry is incredibly simple (Sulfuric Acid + Lead), and is very well studied.
Really? What? Put on a tiny black and white display?? No backlight?? Tiny processor?? No SSD?? No HDD??
I mean, this is awesome. And look forward to see where it is going. Not sure what Dell and Apple will learn??
> Dell and Apple can learn that there are consumers out there who want low cost minimalist options with long battery lives and long operational lives.
They don't want their business and low marigin sales.
Also Macbook air has what, 18 hours of battery life ? That's enough for vast majority of users.
The real advantage of long battery life isn’t so much the duration when new but both reducing the number of charge cycles and preserving battery life as the device ages.
The number of consumers who not only complain about planned obsolescence but also put money where their mouth is, is tiny. It's easy to get people on board with the idea behind projects like Fairphone, but then they do a price comparison and buy a cheap Huawei.
The market for Linux laptops is already a small niche and those aren't all that limiting for users when it comes to processing power and software support. Now take away the modern web browser and very few people would consider it for anything more than a little tinkering.
I don't mean this in a "capitalist bad" way, it's mostly great but there are certain innovations and technologies that don't fit well with a need to get the most return possible on capital invested. There's a "dead space" of techs that would benefit everyone, need some capital to create - but don't allow a lot of value to be captured.
A bit like how we see more VC excitement about "vat grown meat" (a centralised industrial model that exacerbates supply chain dependency and further alienates people from their food - but is perfect for capturing value) vs working on "super potatoes" or algae-based systems that would be low-dependency and could scale down to individuals.
Orthodoxy is that government is supposed to help with this stuff but they have their own incentives (some of them a result of industry capture) which rarely align with decentralisation, degrowth or reduced dependency. For example recent battles to get laws passed to even allow you to repair your own stuff.