Some of the most durable, best looking, and best sounding portable radios were the boom boxes of the 1970s and 1980s. They were also cultural icons, appearing in films like Say Anything, Do the Right Thing and Pump Up the Volume -- the community hearth of media.
Modern digital FM tuners such as the Si4703 from the iPod nano use a fraction of the power of 80's electronics, they are super cheap and they have all kinds of great features, like seek, remembering your favourite stations and the Radio Data System (RDS).
https://play.library.utoronto.ca/82ff69ed5165487db099c4464a7b2f18
There's also the ability to stream music from your phone to a radio over Bluetooth, and internet radio, where you can listen to a station from anywhere.
Radios can now be tiny, even a mason jar lid (Zach Dunham and Spencer Wright's https://thepublicrad.io).
Power technology has also advanced a long way from the 1980s. Instead of 12 D batteries which wear out after a few hours, we now have Nickel Metal Hydride batteries which are more environmentally friendly and Lithium Ion batteries, both of which we can recharge thousands of times instead of throwing them away after one use.
But what if you wanted your recharging system to NEVER wear out. Enter graphene capacitors -- lower energy density than batteries but will recharge 1,000,000 times (last longer than the stereo).
In previous tests of a Sanyo boombox, I found it could play 2 hours on 15 x 500F capacitors, which I could charge in about 5 minutes from a rooftop solar panel (at 2.5A).
Now that hybrid supercapacitors are available from Eaton, whose energy densities approach batteries, there's the opportunity to invest boomboxes with energy storage comparable to their original performance, but the storage will NEVER wear out.
https://www.eaton.com/us/en-us/catalog/electronic-components/hybrid-supercapacitors.html
In this project I'll take a much loved Boombox, remove the tape deck, upcycle the tuner to the aforementioned digital chips to take advantage of new networking technologies supporting radio, and give it an improved rechargeable graphene capacitor system for some serious sustainable power storage.
 | |
 |