Every gamer has once in their lifetime owned a Game Boy but with the new technology and new graphics, these gaming devices have kind of been worthless. But a guy has come up with a solution to use your Game Boy with the newest technology.?
When you think of nuclear power, what comes to mind is probably a giant power plant with those distinctly curved cooling towers generating enough power to light up several cities. But smaller versions exist too, allowing military vehicles like submarines and aircraft carriers to remain deployed for months on end without the need to return to port for a fill-up.? But Charnas approach was different.?
The YouTuber shared a proper explainer video that showed his method of playing Tetris on GameBoy. He starts off by explaining how a nuclear power plant works and explains that for his project, he would not be using uranium, which is the chemical that fuels most of the high-powered nuclear plants as it is tough to obtain, but tritium which can be bought easily.
He goes on and explains the unique properties of tritium in his video and says that it is an isotope of hydrogen that is gaseous and mildly radioactive. To utilise this radioactive nature of tritium, Charnas created a solar cell that converted the light of the tritium into energy.
He then mentioned how he tested various solar cells to test which one produces the most power at a low-light-level. Considering the low radioactivity of tritium, the most difficult part for him was to find a battery that could hold the energy generated faster than it would dissipate. For this, he looked for thin-film solid-state batteries that leak at an extremely slow speed.
While doing all of this realized that a Game Boy uses a million microwatts, which is a lot of energy expected from his Tritium batteries. He then brought a cheap handheld gaming device that only consumed a thousand microwatts. Even though this too was a lot to expect from the tritium battery, he looked for a way to store the energy produced by the nuclear battery to play Tetris for a while.?
In the video, he finally found a way to store the energy.?With the help of thin-film solid-state batteries, he charges the batteries for two months before connecting them to his game machine. Even though the energy produced was quite low considering how much time it took to charge one could actually learn a lot from the video.?