Recently, designer Andreas Eriksen developed a notebook computer project. The biggest selling point is that it can run for up to 2 years on a full charge.
Eriksen said the project arose out of his own frequent experience of running out of battery on his laptop. Eriksen is mainly responsible for the development of “small programming projects” in his usual work. He does not have much demand for hardware performance. The high performance configuration of the current notebook computers has become the main reason for the decline in battery life.
The PotatoP notebook is based on the SparkFun RedBoard Artemis ATP development board, powered by the Ambiq Apollo3 processor. The processor adopts the Arm Cortex-M4F architecture with a maximum clock rate of 96MHz, and consumes less than 6mA of current per MHz, which is very energy-saving.
With 384KB RAM and 1MB storage, the SBC provides a wealth of interface and connection options. The screen is a 4.4-inch monochrome LS044Q7DH01 with a resolution of 320×240. Although it is an “ancient” monochrome screen, it has good readability under direct sunlight and is energy-efficient enough.
On the system side, PotatoP runs a Lisp environment (uLisp). During the creative process, the need to create the necessary application software in Lisp became part of the fun of Eriksen’s development process.
PotatoP has a built-in 12000mAh large capacity battery and a solar panel, which can run continuously for up to 2 years when fully charged.