DIY Gameboy Powered by Radioactivity

As it turns out, radioactivity can be used to power a Gameboy. Maker Ian Charnas has made a wildly inefficient Gameboy that runs on glass tubes of tritium. Here’s more from MOTHERBOARD:

The design for the tritium battery isn’t new, and it’s also not powerful. For the project, Charnas laid out a line of tritium vials and wrapped it in solar cells. That was the easy part.  The hard part was finding a battery that could hold the energy generated faster than it would dissipate. Charnas tracked down thin-film solid-state batteries that leak very slowly.

The problem is that the solid-state batteries are nightmares to work with, he explained in the video. They’re so small and finicky that it’s hard to get them lined up properly on a circuit board. Machines typically handle the precise measurements of aligning a solid-state battery, but Charnas had to do it by hand.

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