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Google TV has done much to revolutionize the living room and how we use it for entertainment as one central hub that’s both approachable and simplified. It doesn’t get everything right, I dislike the heavy advertising, and Google certainly takes years to add what’s needed for the core experience, but it’s much better than what we had before. Needless to say that flaws and all, I’m a big Google TV fan.
One thing I’ve never really liked, however, is having to change the batteries out on my Chromecast with Google TV remote all the freaking time. Actually, for the first time in many, many years, I’ve been forced to buy real batteries. That’s right, I have a pack of batteries in my home from Amazon now so that I can keep swapping out the remote’s power source since they seem to be dead every time I blink at my 65-inch TV.
Whether or not I’m blinking or glazing over and watching hundreds of hours of shows and movies without realizing time is passing is irrelevant – the idea of batteries in a TV remote is how I grew up, but it’s just not ideal. Luckily, a new approach to this cropped up at CES this year, and we totally missed it – self-charging batteries!
I’m not kidding. I know that it sounds sci-fi, but it’s real. In fact, we’ve had this technology around for a while now, and Samsung and other manufacturers like it have already produced their own self-charging remotes. TW Electronics, the folks who created the reference schematics for most Google TV remotes that exist on the market today have revealed a self-charging, battery-free remote control for Google TV that literally operates solely off of the light you have inside of your home.
See that big, vertical rectangle at the bottom of the remote in the image found in their tweet? That basically works like a solar panel. Well, sort of. It’s actually called a photovoltaic panel, and it converts thermal energy in the room (the heat coming from the environmental light) into electricity, while solar panels convert solar radiation directly from the sun into heat.
For now, there’s no release date for the remote that TW Electronics is working on, but my guess is that a Google-themed version of it will launch with the next Chromecast that the company is developing. If we get a PV panel for self-charging on the remote and we don’t get more storage on the dongle itself, I’m going to be pretty upset. That being said, we’ll keep you up-to-date as we discover more!
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