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from the doesn't-recharge-in-the-basement dept.
Solar-powered watches are nothing new, but being more power-hungry beasts, solar-powered smartwatches are a different story. A San Francisco-based startup called LunaR now claims to have bridged the divide by developing a smartwatch that never needs to be plugged in for a recharge as it draws all the energy it needs from the sun.
The LunaR... includes sleep and activity tracking, along with integration with social media and messaging apps to bring notifications to the wrist through an embedded LED array.
At the heart of what the creators claim is the world's first solar-powered smartwatch is (unsurprisingly) a breakthrough in solar technology. With a clear solar panel layered over the watch face, it's claimed the LunaR can harvest energy from both natural and artificial light. So much so, that with as little as one hour of daily exposure to light, its 110-mAh lithium-polymer battery can apparently stay fully charged.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:34PM
No way. The battery capacity is an unimportant stat, just a distraction. Obviously they aren't charging that in an hour of sunlight though. What they would have to do to sustain the claim is to top up the power drain from the previous 23 hours of running the sensors and radios in a single hour of energy collected through a transparent solar cell. They probably couldn't do it with a traditional cell where the best approach 40% efficiency, they damned sure ain't with a transparent one where efficiency is a percent or two.
But since it doesn't actually have a display to get in the way, it looks like they are putting a fairly normal cell behind the hands just like solar watches have done for a long time. Why bother with a transparent one when you have that much surface ready to use? They managed to make it a bit translucent so they could have a pitch for their crowdfunding campaign and harvest money from stupid people. But if it could really charge in an hour under sunlight they wouldn't have bothered with the USB recharging port, right? They would say put it under a bright lamp for an hour and go.