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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'.
I just built a kernel specifically without the bluetooth modules in an attempt to save power on my laptop. Damn you progress.
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?
Couple the keyboard with a battery charger (powered by its own batteries)
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!
I'm not sure what kind of camera you use, but the rechargeable, proprietary battery that came with my Canon DSLR has worked well for years and gone through hundreds of charge / discharge cycles without any noticeable reduction in battery life. While not as cheap as AA batteries, I just looked up replacement cost and found that I could get a new battery for about $30 -- not that I have any need to at this point.
And while the battery is proprietary to canon, it's used in a number of their DSLR cameras, so there's a good chance that if I replace my camera I'll be able to keep the old battery as a spare.
Try getting that proprietary battery in another 5-10 years. There are vintage cameras operating today that are many decades old. This will not be the case in future.
Also some manufacturers are worse than others and have a new camera per camera or set of similar cameras. Others re-use the same battery.
What is needed is a set of standard sized Lithium batteries...There's no reason for the current mess other than planned obsolence and price gouging. Heck Sony has even started chipping their cameras the way printer manufacturers chip their cartridges to prevent 3rd party batteries from eating into their overpriced originals.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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!
The bluetooth spec is extensible.
You don't have to have constant communications, you only have to answer polls, but only as often as the other side sends them.
With just a small profile change you could minimize that to once an hour if you wanted.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
About ten years ago, I bought a Memorex wireless keyboard at Pic-n-save aka "Big Lots".
I think I paid about $10.
Much to my amazement, its still running on a pair of "Everready lithium" batteries I put in when I first got it.
I put those batteries in everything that I have a tendency to ignore maintenance on, like remotes. I have never seen one of those lithium cells leak yet.
Its been one of those things with me that alkaline cells, regardless of who made them, leak. Even if they aren't dead yet.
I rarely use the keyboard, but when I do, it works. It only transmits ten feet or so, but its enough. It feeds an old P166 I have loaded with DOS and WIN95 to run my old DOS stuff.
What impressed me so was that the keyboard had no on-off switch. For ten years, the keyboard has been sitting there waiting for me to press a key.
My hat's off to the engineer who designed the thing.
I would not mind paying more for this keyboard's electronics in a sturdier mechanical design, but for ten bucks, I thought I got a really nice little gadget.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
IBM Model M, a keyboard that you can use to kill a man, then use to type his obituary.
Crack open that battery and what do you find? A couple of standard sized lithium batteries.
Yes, not even Amazon has any sub-100 dollar bluetooth mice. And the certainly have no sub-100 dollar bluetooth keyboards either!
And don't even get me started on Apple and their price gouging 100$+ 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?