Low Power Challenge: The PotatoP runs Lisp for months without recharging
A common complaint among laptop users is that, although battery technology has improved dramatically over the past few decades, a concurrent reduction in form factors means that today's typical laptop Today doesn't last much longer on a battery charge than one from the early 2000s. But it doesn't have to be that way, as [Andreas Eriksen] demonstrates with his participation in the Low Power Challenge. The PotatoP is a portable computer that should be able to operate for about two years on a single battery charge and can be recharged using a built-in solar panel.
Granted, it doesn't have the processing power of the cheapest laptop you can buy today, but it's a perfect fit for [Andreas'] use case. He's a Lisp hacker, and a Sparkfun RedBoard Artemis can run uLisp just fine on his 48MHz Cortex-M4F CPU. The operating environment is very basic though, even requiring [Andreas] to write his own text editor, called Typo, to give him editing luxuries like backspace functionality and a movable cursor.
The Artemis board itself is very power efficient: typical power consumption is less than 1mA. [Andreas] added a simple monochrome black and white LCD screen capable of displaying 53 columns of text, plus an SD card slot for data storage, and designed a sleek 3D-printed case to hold it all together. When running a typical piece of code, the entire system uses around 2.5mA, which translates to around 125 days of continuous battery life on the powerful 12,000mAh lithium battery. Add some solar power, plus a more realistic eight-hour workday, and [Andreas]'s estimated two-year runtime seems quite reasonable.
It has to be one of the most power-efficient laptops we've ever seen, and one running Lisp to boot. Despite its age, Lisp continues to appear in interesting custom computers like the Lisperati1000 cyberdeck and The Lisp Badge.
A common complaint among laptop users is that, although battery technology has improved dramatically over the past few decades, a concurrent reduction in form factors means that today's typical laptop Today doesn't last much longer on a battery charge than one from the early 2000s. But it doesn't have to be that way, as [Andreas Eriksen] demonstrates with his participation in the Low Power Challenge. The PotatoP is a portable computer that should be able to operate for about two years on a single battery charge and can be recharged using a built-in solar panel.
Granted, it doesn't have the processing power of the cheapest laptop you can buy today, but it's a perfect fit for [Andreas'] use case. He's a Lisp hacker, and a Sparkfun RedBoard Artemis can run uLisp just fine on his 48MHz Cortex-M4F CPU. The operating environment is very basic though, even requiring [Andreas] to write his own text editor, called Typo, to give him editing luxuries like backspace functionality and a movable cursor.
The Artemis board itself is very power efficient: typical power consumption is less than 1mA. [Andreas] added a simple monochrome black and white LCD screen capable of displaying 53 columns of text, plus an SD card slot for data storage, and designed a sleek 3D-printed case to hold it all together. When running a typical piece of code, the entire system uses around 2.5mA, which translates to around 125 days of continuous battery life on the powerful 12,000mAh lithium battery. Add some solar power, plus a more realistic eight-hour workday, and [Andreas]'s estimated two-year runtime seems quite reasonable.
It has to be one of the most power-efficient laptops we've ever seen, and one running Lisp to boot. Despite its age, Lisp continues to appear in interesting custom computers like the Lisperati1000 cyberdeck and The Lisp Badge.
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