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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."
Hahaha...whew, that's a good one.
Now tell me we're gonna have flying cars 'within the next 15-30 years'.
With specialty lithium batteries that cost near as much as they keyboard :P Alkaline
The shelf life of an alkaline battery is only about 7 years.
...to increase battery life of course....and when they fail in 3 years instead of the promised 10, you get to go out and buy a whole new keyboard. (It lasts 10 years so why allow the user to change the battery).
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. This is for the good of the consumer of course, not so the camera manufacturer can gouge on batteries and make it more cost effective for the customer to replace the camera every 2-3 years. Makes me want to spit.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Can't wait.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I wonder about the potential for greener computing. If the power usage is so low, drop the battery all together and add a solar cell with a low leakage super cap.
I just built a kernel specifically without the bluetooth modules in an attempt to save power on my laptop. Damn you progress.
I didn't think alkaline batteries would last that long on the shelf, let alone in use.
Also, 10 years is nothing for a keyboard! I've got an IBM Model M that's at least from the mid 80's and works fine.
what kind of batteries will not self discharge in less than 10 years even without a load ?....
Why not put wires on the key board (perhaps even a USB connection), and the battery is not even needed. Wow.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Most stuff nowadays is cheap shit made in India or China or whatever? None of it is going to work in ten years time. You'll be lucky if you're still using it in 2 or 3 years. And that's if we've not moved onto another even better standard than Bluetooth, which doesn't seem to have taken off outside of headsets.
Out of interest, why exactly don't *all* TVs/DBD players etc use bluetooth? It would be quite handy to be able to use any phone made in the last 10 years to control them all using free, intuitive software, rather than a pile of ugly plastic crap, all of which need battery maintenance, all work in different ways etc?
I wonder if this development is a consequence of Broadcom's acquisition of G2 Microsystems, the Australian ultra low power WiFi people?
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
The silly thing is, chances are keyboards using such chip would actually include that set of two AA batteries.
As opposed to sticking a 1 cm^2 solar cell + supercapacitor onto it. Or a mechanism for "tilt back & forth a few times, use rest of the week". Well you get the point: if low-power enough, use that to get rid of batteries, not just prolong their life.
The standard dry cell, based on manganese dioxide electrolyte, zinc as cathode and carbon as anode if I remember my high school physics right, does not last that even if it is not used!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Just as long as you don't leave the capslock LED on.
Someone had to do it.
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?
Several problems:
- Forget to charge your battery? You're out of luck! You won't be able to get a standard replacement alkaline battery for a couple of bucks at the corner store
- Looked after your camera for many years and want to sell it or show your children a vintage camera? You're out of luck! Your battery is too old to hold charge and they don't make batteries for that model camera any more
- Have a lot of different cameras, and want to share a couple of sets of batteries between them? You're out of luck. Each camera you own uses a different battery. You need at least one per camera
- You're a camera enthusiast and want to buy spare battteries? You'll have to decide which camera you need a spare battery for. You can't afford $30 x number of spares x cameras
I've seen a lot of silly justifications ranging from the technology keeps improving so why would you want to use the old camera to who owns lots of cameras. But I promise you for me and many others these things matter. We talk about recycling and reuse, have shopping bags too flimsy to hold our goods that we are now charged for, conserve water, and use less than optimal lighting solutions to conserve energy, but the moment a company stands to make a profit by making something throw away or selling you a whole bunch of junk when one item would suffice, well the environment goes out the window. It's moronic to be this wasteful.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
tinfoil hat time!
This bluetooth chip would draw a whopping .057mAh at 1.5v, or .0285mAh at 3v. (Assuming a 2500mAh AA cell type, with 10 years of power draw.)
You can easily generate this using biologically inplanted power sources, or from a standard solar powered calculator's photocell, or even from a thin film thermocoupler.
This would allow for ubiquitous bluetooth devices in a lot of surfaces, including things you would never consider to have need of a network stack.
Hell, you could power this stack on an AM crystal radio!
Can I have a pony too?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
is that there are so many to choose from. When cameras were larger, you had more room for batteries, but as there's increasing pressure to make them smaller and more power-hungry, that fails.
If 2.4v is enough, you can use two AA batteries (most rechargeables only do 1.2v, but they hold a lot more power than 1.5v disposables), but it takes up a fair bit of space.
3.6v and 3.7v LiPo rechargeable technology is becoming a widely available standard, with a range of different sizes and capacities, but needs an extra chip or two for power management (since they're very sensitive to over-charging and over-draining - dropping below 3.0v tends to kill them.) Since it's a bit below 5v, that means a standard USB is the obvious power supply interface for charging as well as data, and cellphones and similar devices use them.
Also, while I can see that you might need to replace the charger for a camera, why would you want to use a point&shoot digital camera that's old enough that you can't find batteries for it? Resolution has been improving rapidly, and prices have been dropping rapidly. Using a bigger camera with real lenses on it, sure, but any point&shoot I can buy today is a lot better than the good one I got a couple of years ago.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If the current draw is that low then you could just use a solar panel to recharge from room lights. Just like the calculators do. problem solved.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Heh.
Who would even /want/ to sit more than 36 inches from their monitor?
Now watch this drive.
It's obviously clunky, but it shouldn't be hard to set up an external battery pack with four AA rechargeables and a USB output. If you want to get fancy, add a voltage regulator chip as insurance, in case your camera doesn't have one built in, or just trust that 4x1.2 - 4x1.5 is safe.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
About ten years ago, I bought a Memorex wireless keyboard at Pic-n-save aka "Big Lots".
I think I paid about $10.
Much to my amazement, its still running on a pair of "Everready lithium" batteries I put in when I first got it.
I put those batteries in everything that I have a tendency to ignore maintenance on, like remotes. I have never seen one of those lithium cells leak yet.
Its been one of those things with me that alkaline cells, regardless of who made them, leak. Even if they aren't dead yet.
I rarely use the keyboard, but when I do, it works. It only transmits ten feet or so, but its enough. It feeds an old P166 I have loaded with DOS and WIN95 to run my old DOS stuff.
What impressed me so was that the keyboard had no on-off switch. For ten years, the keyboard has been sitting there waiting for me to press a key.
My hat's off to the engineer who designed the thing.
I would not mind paying more for this keyboard's electronics in a sturdier mechanical design, but for ten bucks, I thought I got a really nice little gadget.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The chipset may ensure 10 years lifetime without replacing battery, but how about the buttons? People tends to slam the keyboard out of frustration.
I'd like to avoid testicular cancer from having a nuclear device so close to my balls...
No sig for the moment.
Devices for 802.15.4 (what ZigBee uses), which is 250kbit max and low power device typically use just a tiny fraction of that, are already using AAA alkaline cells for multiple years (and then the shelf life starts to impact the cells). And the open source operating system TinyOS has made some interesting advancements with power management for its 802.15.4 based wireless stack. And the other front runner for open source wireless stacks is Contiki, with a rather nice mini IPv6 stack that is also capable of being extremely low power.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Next time you are in your local Mega-lo-mart check out the battery rack for the Everready Ultimate Lithium.
http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_constraint=0&ic=48_0&Find.x=0&Find.y=0&Find=Find&_ta=1&search_query=energizer%20lithium%20batteries&_tt=energizer%20lithium
The 8X on the package art seems a bit optimistic to me, but I personally have some of their first batteries ( gold with a red top ) still in service. I get the idea I do not get anywhere near 8X the Watt-Hr rating of a similiarly sized alkaline, but I get a helluva lot more shelf life from the lithiums.
None of them have leaked.
These are great for remotes, your earthquake kit, and the flashlight you keep in your car that has never worked when you needed it.
Being I work a lot with electronic instruments, all of it gets these cells. Not only will the differential probe set still work after a year in the drawer, there won't be a mess inside. In the event of an emergency, I know which instruments have cells I can raid for the flashlights and radios if the need arises.
Its awful expensive to waste these in toys and high-use items though. Best use the dollar-store alkalines for those.
It puzzles me as to why anyone messes with the old carbon-zinc chemistry anymore, but judging by the battery rack, its still popular.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
How you can you create nuclear batteries if Hari Seldon isn't even born yet. You lack a Foundation in psychohistory.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have never seen a AA battery that wasn't sucked dead in a few years just from the internal resistance of the battery itself. I suppose they're are referring to lithium batteries.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Somehow, that makes me think of the old watch my dad had. World War II. Radium dial. Phosphorescent. Stayed lit all the time.
A lot of people got sick making those watches. They would rub the brushes against their lips to make a fine point to paint with. The watches were later deemed to be dangerous and were no longer made.
But, could we design a special "solar cell" that would take that radiation and convert it to electricity?
How about miniature "radiation cell" array surrounding a low-level alpha source. Maybe it could provide a couple of uA, for hundreds of years. Enough to keep a super-cap charged.
Its your suggestion, AC. I think its a good one. It just needs a bit of engineering to bring it to reality.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Those watches are still made every day. The light is generated by radioactive decay. Its rather well understood, its not really that dangerous unless of course you're eating large quantities of a toxic metal because you think eating paint is a good idea.
In order for there to be enough useful energy there to harvest, it starts to become dangerous without shielding, then it gets complex and makes small scale production a ways off.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Great. But how about they release a chipset that doesnt cost the earth in licensing fees, so that we can finally buy Bluetooth devices for less than $100.
I swear every time I look at mice and keyboards, proprietary 2.4GHz gear can be as low as $20 and you can get something very good for $50 or $60, but anything with Bluetooth is instantly $100 plus. It's the biggest barrier to adoption that I know.
Will it have the same 40% extra cost for the Bluetooth name like the rare bluetooth mice do?
Can this Bluetooth Keyboard also hang for 10 seconds twice a day like my Microsoft Bluetooth mouse does?
Will the Keyboard last the 10 years or just the battery?
I miss my Logitech Bluetooth mouse, too bad the buttons didn't last more than 3 years....
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
Add some piezo-electric thingie and harvest energy every time the user presses a key.
"This is all well and good, but how many times has a keyboard wire gotten that much in your way"
Exactly! Not to mention that keeping a keyboard 10 years is disgusting!
Skin particles drop every day into them, there are all sorts of bacteria and molds in there living from them who send billions of spores into the air right into your face.
Impossible to clean, I just use 12$ wired keyboards and throw them out after a year when they get too icky for me.
I'm going to assume a lot of "perfect" hardware here but:
Total travel for your average keyboard: 4mm = 0.004m
Total force needed to activate: 0.8N (scrimmed from a paper on ergonomics of keyboards)
Work required = 0.0032Nm
Average typist = 30 words per minute = 180 characters per minute = 3 characters per second. So you would tap a key to its full extent every 1/3rd of a second.
Power required to type = 0.010666666666667 watt = 10mW at instantaneous intervals. Hardly enough to power a small USB signal, let alone a transmitting Bluetooth chip, and that's not including things like storage of power when you're not typing, efficiencies, etc.
And NONE of that is useful energy - you'd have to make the keys take twice as much extra effort to type (and thus also incur more RSI-related problems) just to generate that 10mW in excess. The hardware required to make an over-100-keys keyboard generate any useful energy from every key would be, at it's simplest, some sort of sprung base that was activated for every keypress below the "base" level where the keys "hit bottom". You'd have a travel of 4mm at most there, and from those 3 presses a second you'd have to generate electricity somehow.
The closest thing I've seen are quantum tunnelling composites and piezoelectrics that require a lot more force, or generate too little electricity, to do anything useful and I don't think you *can* get them as flat sheets the size of a keyboard (though you might be able to arrange some sort of whole keyboard -> small pressurised area).
I just don't think the engineering required would ever reasonably be worth it, it would be more fragile, have many more moving parts, be harder to type on (at risk of inducing RSI), would probably move more under your fingers, and still require internal batteries / capacitors to cope over even brief non-typing periods.
In a single line: Just not worth it.
Which is probably why they don't exist.
I have a tendency to destroy cheaper keyboards in about a year's time (I am a heavy typer...) Unless they make the darn thing sturdy enough to survive constant use for the course of a decade, it doesn't matter how long you have the battery last.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
you can clean the expensive ones. Unscrew the keyboard half from the circuitboard half and pop it in your dishwasher without detergent on the quick and warm cycle (not the 3 hour blast baked-on-crap cycle).
Let it dry and you've got a squeaky clean keyboard. Do not put the electronics in or it'll break.
I have an ancient compaq that I did this with, came out shiny and bright and the 6 key was no longer gunked up with spilled beer.
I use wired Microsoft Natural keyboards and only replace when the letters wear off (despite not needing to see them). It takes about an hour twice a year to take all the keys off one-by-one and wash them by hand then wipe down the base, and put them back on. And all that time doubles as TV-watching time, so no time wasted.
If you don't actually type anything.
Why even have batteries if it is so low power. You know, with all the tapping on a keyboard, why can't they put in a kinetic energy harvesting chip like the one's I have been seeing in tech journals lately. Or even a little solar panel like Logitech's solar keyboard.
...battery corrosion thereby breaking the keyboard.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence