• KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    16 days ago

    This is wild; the battery would outlive the electronics it’s powering in almost all cases.

    The output is incredibly tiny, but I wonder if it could be used to trickle-charge a higher-output battery for use in electronics that only need to be used infrequently for short durations.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      That was my immediate thought too. Hook it to a super capacitor. The only problem is the self discharge is probably higher than what the nuclear cell can feed.

      • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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        16 days ago

        That’s a good point; it becomes less economical if you need multiple of these cells just to counteract the self-discharge. Even so, it’s really just a demo of the technology; they do mention they expect to have a 1 watt model later this year.

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      It’s becoming quite rare to change the CR2032 on a PC motherboard these days. Even those tend to outlive the hardware.

  • Badabinski@kbin.earth
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    16 days ago

    I was concerned about what happens when someone accidentally throws away a device with a fresh battery, but this:

    The BV100 harnesses energy from the radioactive decay of its nickel-63 core. The two-micron thick core, sandwiched between two 10-micron thick diamond semiconductors

    makes me feel a bit better. That really isn’t much radioactive material. Still, it’d be good to see some environmental impact studies done in some worst case scenarios.

    • db2@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      It has to be. Making a big one is effectively impossible, the amount of shielding needed goes up much faster than the amount of radioactive material used.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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      16 days ago

      Without any expertise, I’m going to say that minuscule amounts of radioactive nickel from your CR2032 replacements compared to wasted lithium on pretty much every battery your all current devices have plus single use LiIon-cells on e-cigs, single use toys and whatever is a pretty good improvement. In 100 years or so all that nickel is converted to copper with small amounts of radiation and heat as byproducts, in today’s technology, is pretty good.

      And the radiation is beta-negative. I’m not an nuclear physicist, but if I’m not mistaken your common 3032 cell has enough metal to shield pretty much all of the radiation. Just don’t eat them and maybe stick with li-ion on your wrist watch.

  • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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    16 days ago

    Damn. I had to look up the SI prefix scale to make sure i got this right. 100 microwatts would be 0.1 miliwatts. If they truly do end up releasing a 1 watt version of this battery, it would be fucking perfect for meshtastic nodes. Currently, the most common radios used in those nodes transmit at 22 dBm, which is about 150 milliwatts. In client mute mode, the radio by itself transmits one packet every six to eight minutes on average. A 1W battery should constantly run the node without ever having to charge it or, even if not, only have to charge it extremely rarely. I’m not sure how long it takes to actually transmit a packet, but assuming it takes a minute per packet, which I think would be incredibly unlikely, then it would transmit seven times per hour if it transmitted every five minutes and would use about 21.4 milliwatts. As efficient as the NRF-52 chip is, I suspect it is the thing that’s taking up most of the power.

  • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    16 days ago

    100 microwatts

    This is a very important spec to include…this battery can deliver 0.03mA of power, which is incredibly little.

  • rebelflesh@lemm.ee
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    16 days ago

    Read the article guys, yes it is extremely low amperage how ever they are meant to be used in parallel, as you would expect, you use this right now in real life applications I don’t see the niche part but 5 cels the size of a nikle can power most iot micro nodes.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    16 days ago

    searching Walmart website

    Not yet.

    The real market if this does hit actual shelves is whoever creates adapters for existing products.

    • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Maybe for the 1-watt version they teased, but this one isn’t powering consumer-level anything.