Comment on A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years

GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• fidodo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  1 Watt is plenty to power a phone on average. While idle a phone uses less than 1 Watt. The thing is, nuclear batteries are a misnomer, they’re actual electrical generators. For this to work in a phone, you’d want to pair it with an actual battery, and the generator would charge the battery while the phone is idle and that would provide enough power on average for when you’re actively using your phone.

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  • 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    My idea exactly. Unless it can output at least double of what the phone’s max drain is, there is no other way.

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• abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  1W is enough for a cell phone, if you combined it with a capacitor for brief bursts at higher watts.

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  • fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Now play a game for an hour…

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    • nous@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not all phones need to play games and gaming phones don’t need to use this type of technology. I would love a phone that I don’t need to charge and most people could benefit from one. And for the select few that like to play intensive games on it then they can get ones that would need to be charged.

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      • fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah especially with just 0.001% of the estimated workload (~10W when gaming, but even when standby 0.5W, 100uW are still just 0.02% of that…). Needs a lot more research…

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    • aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You throttle the cpu with long heavy workloads, just like phones already do due to the significant thermal constraints of the form factor.

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  • Lojcs@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    My phone uses 0.6W when idle and 1.2-2.5W while I’m using it. Peaks are 8W+. No way an internal reactor only can power a phone.

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    • fidodo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      A nuclear battery is not actually a battery, it’s a generator. Trying to run something purely off a generator is stupidly inefficient because you’d need the output potential for the max load at all times even when on average the load is much lower. You absolutely want to pair a generator with a battery. Even power plants have batteries to store excess power.

      If you think a little past the name misnomer it’s obvious that this would work by pairing it with a smaller battery to handle spikes in usage. The end result is still the same though, you’d have a phone you’d never have to plug in.

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      • Lojcs@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        What makes you think I didn’t think past the name? If my phone had a generator it would have a 8hr sot/day limit, it’d need a not so small 1000mAh+ battery to balance out night/day usage difference and still wouldn’t last an hour while gaming. That’s not an upgrade for me

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• 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You could do it with a parallelized output from a bunch of them.

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  • Tja@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Or with a diesel generator in a wheelbarrow

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