Hi Blinks community!
I got my set after the first Kickstarter, and I have been lurking on the forums for a while, but I haven’t been compelled to post anything myself until now.
This is a weird first post, but here we go.
I shared the Blinks kickstarter with another online community that I’m a part of. The Future of Coding comunity
The thread started a heated but interesting argument about the choice to use CR2032 batteries instead of a charging solution.
Would @bigjosh or @jbobrow or someone from Move38 mind giving some insight into that design decision, both from a manufacturing point of view and from an energy management point of view?
One of the most interesting responses is below. What are your thoughts on something like this?
I’m sure you considered charging solutions, I’m just curious what the process was.
What they could have done is put a small supercapacitor in each one, so that when disconnected it has some number of seconds of life left before you have to reconnect it; and then have an outboard power brick, possibly using the super cheap laptop power bricks that can be had for $10 at the wholesale level, that would supply enough wattage to power all the connected modules. With a hex grid you can easily put a pairs of pins on each of 6 faces, and thus allow them to be powered from a single AC adapter. You can recess the pins so you don’t shock people, but if you distribute 5V safety would not be a big problem. A 50W laptop brick would probably power 50 cells if they are the approx. 1W that i expect they are. Or maybe have a special cell which is the hard drive for the the cells so you can disconnect and reconnect them at will, by rebooting the nodes from either the neighbors or the special NAS cell. If you pump the flash memory too often it will wear out, so best to have what might be considered a NAS cell. With a communication system between the nodes, and a super cheap cell, the toy would be hella fun. If you want in the game to have the cells separated by space, you can include blank spacer cells which just have wires inside with no electronics.
From the rest of the community, how has battery life been for you? Has it been a problem for anyone?