Have you ever thought about what it would be like to own a laptop that runs for years on a single charge? A Norwegian programmer, Andreas Eriksen, created a Lisp-powered laptop prototype. He called it PotatoP.
A nice potato
The unusual name of the project comes from the fact that in Norway the word “potato” is often used to describe a low-powered device. Eriksen intentionally created an underpowered portable device for long battery life, using low-power parts.
I do first, I always say, to show you the video.
Some technical details
At the heart of the PotatoP is a SparkFun Artemis module, which has a single low-power Arm Cortex-M4F core running at up to 96 MHz and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity. Eriksen runs a modified port of uLisp, a Lisp designed specifically for microcontrollers, dubbed PotatOS. To avoid consuming too much energy, the laptop's display is a compact 4,4-inch Sharp Memory Display, a technology halfway between ePaper and traditional liquid crystal displays (LCD) which has no backlight and consumes a minimum of power.
A laptop with incredible efficiency
It may be "a potato", as mentioned, but the PotatoP prototype perfectly demonstrates its inventor's thesis: a lot can still be done to improve the autonomy of our laptops (and our devices in general).
I'm not saying that a laptop should be like this, of course. But, though. If by working a little on some parameters Eriksen achieved these results, there is margin. With a 1,2 Ah lithium battery and a small solar cell (mounted directly on the device) PotatoP can stay charged for up to two years.
“It depends on ambient light and consumption, of course,” says the programmer. However, the order of magnitude is the same.
If you are interested in deepening and perhaps improving the project, the material on Eriksen's PotatoP laptop is available on this site, open-source. Here instead find the PotatOS source code. Come on! In the meantime, I'm going to throw away the charger.
