Intel's Wine-Powered Microprocessor 126
angry tapir writes "In a new twist on strange brew, an Intel engineer has showed off a project using wine to power a microprocessor. The engineer poured red wine into a glass containing circuitry on two metal boards during a keynote by Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Once the red wine hit the metal, the microprocessor on a circuit board powered up. The low-power microprocessor then ran a graphics program on a computer with an e-ink display."
this just in (Score:5, Informative)
Putting dissimilar metals connected by external conductive path in an electrolyte will cause current flow.
I've even seen some outdoors website forum people going gaga over the concept that nailing a couple dissimilar metallic spikes into a tree can "make electricity". Please, just carry a spare battery for your cell phone, breaching the bark of a tree with reactive metals is bad.
Re:this just in (Score:5, Informative)
I got a good chuckle from your comment but maybe the point of the demo is how little juice is required to power the computer.
Re:this just in (Score:5, Informative)
AC is of course correct - the point was that they made the equivalent of a potato clock [wikihow.com], but on a computer.
IIRC, they're not even the first to make a simple electrolysis battery drive a computer [slashdot.org]. Which means we have at least one outside boundary for the typical Slashdot editor's memory-span...
Re: this is exactly what we needed! (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know if you are being serious but AIUI at least one of the electrodes is a consumable. So to maintain crude batteries you need not just a supply of electrolyte (the wine) but also a supply of refined metals.