These aren't new.
They have tiny current output. Only suitable for a few niche applications. The company's claim to fame is making them cheaper, but don't expect much.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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100 microwatts
This is a very important spec to include...this battery can deliver 0.03mA of power, which is incredibly little.
this battery can deliver 0.03mA of power
0.03mA of current. That times the 3 volts = 0.1 mW of power.
Technology Connections, we need you to make another video.
Should be plenty for watches and IOT devices.
Google says a Casio watch needs .004mA so not quite enough.
Did you typo or did he? .03 is significantly bigger than .004
0.03 is 7.5x more than 0.004 tho?
You are right! I didn't count the 0's!
That's definitely in the ballpark though. Surely they could cut 25% power draw to support a 50 year battery.
I wonder how much we really need for a clock (555 eq) to work?
https://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/LM555
2mA minimum, and that's just q current. It's gonna be much higher when you're actually using it for a clock.
I'm sure the casio's main power sink is the display. I bet the refresh rate could be reduced for better battery life.
Isnt the refresh rate just 1 Hz?
Yep.
A lot more than that. 2ma
Analog circuits are weird though
Not really actually...not from a single cell at least
Why not?
A CR2032 has 235 mAh, which I believe Casio watches use, and their batteries last 5-7 years. So, if we divide that out, that's something like 5-6 microamps (235 mAh / 5 years / 365 years / 24 hours * 1000 = 5.36... microamps). Converting this to watts @ 3v: 15-18 microwatts.
I think that math is correct (this question reaches a similar conclusion), and it leaves some headroom as well.
If you remove RF from the equation (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc) and custom build the chip, you can get some very low power draws. If all you're doing is sampling temps or something, you could send an update periodically over serial or something and fit under 100microwatts or so. You could probably even do RF if you have a large enough cap and send once it charges.
CR2032s are used in many things that require significantly more power than that, and this cell is absolutely unfit for almost all other uses than barebones old school digital watches.
Sure. I'm not saying it's a drop-in replacement, just that it has a number of applications. A simple digital watch or even a bare bones IOT device (with periodic serial signaling) could work well with it. You'd essentially set it up once and you'll forget it's still there many years later.
Cell != Battery
Battery = MANY Cells
I am not correcting you just hate the headline.
If you made a battery with 666(667 if we round up) of these you could supply 2ma of power at 3v for 50 years!
I don't have sizes available so assuming 2032 sized batteries... If you stacked them that would be over 2meters tall.
With further advancement these could be viable
what kind of things could you power with that amount?
Almost nothing... Maybe some very basic scientific equipment, but they do note that they'd be able to use multiple batteries layered to produce higher output, and that they're expecting to have a 1 watt version later this year; that'd be far more useful in practice.
An RTC that you want to leave on its own for a very long time. Like underwater.
Are these ones ocean disposable like lead acid batteries?
Someone's gotta charge the eels.
These types of batteries are called wafer batteries because you just eat them
It's wafer thin
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.
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.
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.
It's becoming quite rare to change the CR2032 on a PC motherboard these days. Even those tend to outlive the hardware.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if it's a compatible replacement for a cr2032
Its not, power output is less than 1/1000th of what a cr2032 can deliver
So you’re saying that if I buy about 500 million of these I can use them to charge my electric car?
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.
You had me at "nuclear".
and "enters" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
and "sized".
No "lifespan" people around?
Reminds me of Asimov's Foundation.
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.
searching Walmart website
Not yet.
The real market if this does hit actual shelves is whoever creates adapters for existing products.
Maybe for the 1-watt version they teased, but this one isn't powering consumer-level anything.
yay nuclearwaste for everybody 🥳
The radioactive nickel decays into stable copper and has a half life of 100 years. Not really 'waste'