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Bluetooth Keyboards With a 10-Year Charge Promised
angry tapir writes "Broadcom is working on a Bluetooth chipset that will give wireless keyboards a battery life of up to 10 years. If they had a battery life of as long as 10 years, that Bluetooth-based accessories could potentially never need new batteries, the chip maker said. A set of two AA batteries would be enough to power a keyboard using the BCM20730 Bluetooth chip to connect with a computer for its entire lifetime, Broadcom said."
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery.
Yes, but the batteries are smaller, denser, and last longer. What is the problem, exactly?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
You mean one day in the future we'll be able to have one of these?
Boy, can't wait...
Are you sure that's saving you power? Sometimes you have to initialize the device in order to activate the power saving features. It happens in Windows as well with wireless cards. The default state is "max power."
Sarcasm aside, i picked one of those up when Amazon had a sale, and i've been rather amazed. It was an impulse purchase without any prior research done. I figured with both Logitech and Amazon's names attached it couldn't be a complete scam, but i though i'd probably have to be careful to make sure to put it under bright light every so often to keep it charged up or something, or that the signal strength might be a little weak to compensate. Or something anyways, never having to replace the keyboard batteries again just seemed too good to be true, as trivial as that seems.
:)
In actuality the signal strength is fine, better than my wireless mouse certainly, and not once when i've thought to check has it been below full charge despite being kept in our regular living room lighting conditions, which can be pretty dim at times. One of the coolest bonuses is a button you can press to launch a light meter app on your computer, which will tell you the lux level the solar panels are currently being exposed to. It's been great fun to move the keyboard around and vary the lighting conditions to see how the value changes. It really brings home something everyone familiar with SF or photography is intellectually aware of, that the sun delivers a couple more magnitudes of light than we actually need to see comfortably with.
They keyboard is also incredibly light and thin. My only complaints relate solely to the the way some of the keys and their functions are placed/handled, but that's pretty obviously an issue with design choices and nothing to do with the basic hardware. And despite those quibbles it's still leaps and bounds above my previous Microsoft keyboard. (Silly me, when i bought it online as the only wireless keyboard option for my PC package i was putting together i figured "it's just a keyboard, how badly can Microsoft screw it up?")
Of course some people might not like the fact that it's not ergonomically shaped, but i prefer the old fashioned rectangular slabs
I wonder if they could make a solar powered mouse to match? You'd have to use curved solar panels that didn't feel too weird while you were actually using the mouse...
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I don't think current battery technology lasts that long, especially store bought AA's.
I have a 12 year old bathroom scale still running off of the original lithium battery that was factory installed. I am amazed at how long it has lasted. Lithium is, admittedly, a different beast than alkalines. But 12 years is pretty good for any battery.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Yes, not even Amazon has any sub-100 dollar bluetooth mice. And the certainly have no sub-100 dollar bluetooth keyboards either!
And don't even get me started on Apple and their price gouging 100$+ mice, keyboards and trackpads! Granted, I can't find any 100$+ keyboards, mice or trackpads on Apple's store, but I'm sure they're there! It's not like you'd just pull that 100$+ number out of your ass, right?
Literally if you have enough light to see the technology to harvest it and put it to good use for telemetry exists.... See Cymbet's paper on the design of an Intra Ocular Pressure Sensor here: http://www.cymbet.com/pdfs/eeweb-article.pdf. Something small enough to fit in your eye, report pressure wirelessly and last 10 years without a battery.
From the paper:
To extend lifetime, the IOPM harvests light energy
entering the eye with an integrated 0.07 square millimeter
solar cell that recharges the battery. Given the ultra-small
solar cell size, energy autonomy requires average power
consumption of less than 10nW. For the majority of its
lifetime, the IOPM is in a 3.65nW standby mode where
mixed-signal circuits are disabled, digital logic is powergated,
and 2.4fW/bitcell SRAM retains IOP instructions
and data. The average system power with pressure
measurements every 15 minutes and daily wireless
data transmissions is 5.3nW. When sunny, the solar cells
supply 80.6nW to the battery. The combination of energy
harvesting and low-power operation allows the IOPM
to achieve zero-net energy operation in low light. The
IOPM requires 10 hours of indoor lighting or 1.5 hours of
sunlight per day to achieve energy-autonomy
This would certainly be usable to keep something like a keyboard working forever with a solar cell that was barely noticeable.