How Many Potatoes Does It Take To Run DOOM?

by now most of you have probably heard of doom it's the game that people have managed to get running on everything from luxury cars to pregnancy tests and while i'm not sure i have the technical skill or the patience to figure out how to run it on either of these devices i decided to try a challenge of my own i was going to get doom running powered entirely by potatoes now how exactly does a potato provide power well potatoes have something called phosphoric acid in them if you take anything with zinc in it like a galvanized nail and stick it into a potato the phosphoric acid begins to eat away at it this chemical reaction creates energy and in most cases energy like this just dissipates into the environment around it but because potatoes also have potassium and electrolyte this energy is captured and transferred around the potato so if you place a copper conductor on the other end of the potato that conductor will be positively charged because the electricity will be trying to find a way to escape the potato and that's the easiest way out this is how electricity is generated by a potato now i had no idea how much electricity a potato could make but i knew it wasn't a lot so i needed to get this running on the lowest power device i could possibly find i ended up going with a raspberry pi zero because it only uses about 100 to 120 mil amps at around 5 volts and it's easy to get doom running on it because i didn't want to have to spend all of my time figuring out how to get it running on some obscure device only to realize that i don't know how to do that once i got doom up and running on the raspberry pi i went ahead and got some potatoes and started running some experiments so it turns out a russet potato puts out around 0.9 volts which was the best candidate out of all the potatoes i tested but i couldn't get an amperage reading from it so i just started lining up potatoes until i would get a reading but i didn't want to use whole potatoes because you don't get any electricity with a bigger potato so instead i cut them into pieces and lined them up and it turns out that at around 11 potato pieces i was getting 10 milliamps which means that i was getting just under one milliamp per potato piece i was going to need a lot more potatoes i ran the calculations and it looked like i was going to need around 770 potato pieces this would put me at 100 milliamps at just over 4 volts the reason i didn't care so much about the 5 volts is because raspberry pi is actually run at around 3.3 volts so that voltage overhead wasn't really going to be necessary so then i got something like a hundred pounds of potatoes and got to work boiling them i spent the entire first day just boiling potatoes and doing pretty much nothing else but at the end of the day i had enough potatoes to where i should have been able to get around 770 potato pieces i left the instant pot full of potatoes from yesterday and now it's got a nice skin of starch that's gross the next day i got to work stringing these potatoes up i knew i wasn't going to be able to pull this off on my own so i had one of my friends help me wire up all these potatoes we didn't get super far though and we called it a night at around 10 or 11. at this point we were at about 20 milliamps so i was going to need five times the amount of potatoes cut up and connected i started questioning if i could even pull it off in the amount of time i had i knew the clock was ticking on the potatoes and sooner or later they would start to decompose and i wouldn't be able to use them anymore but i wasn't going to give up the next day i came home from work and got back to it my friend and i kept connecting potatoes again until eventually he left and my wife came along and took his place here it is so right now when i plug it in it jumps up to about 110 milliamps and then drops down to a steady 80. so i am going to try and see if i can get any sign of life from the raspberry pi now i'm really nervous because i don't want this to not work so let's see what we can do this stopped being fun so long ago all right everyone it's 4 15 a.m i've been working on this for three days straight and the whole project for like probably a month now with the help of my wife and my good friend seth i have been able to make this massive array of potatoes and i don't know i think it's probably around 200 potatoes in here you can't even see the whole battery it extends that far 0.08 which is 80 milliamps of electricity from this and we've got eight potatoes deep so it's around four and a half volts i think this is gonna work i think this is actually it this is a moment of truth this could be making history if this works i don't think anyone has ever booted up a computer powered off of live current coming from potatoes not using a battery charged by potatoes not using electricity harvested from potatoes but this is actually active current coming from potatoes i thought for sure this would work i felt like i had it in the bag i hooked it up and i wasn't getting anything or at least i thought but it turns out something was happening because my tv was recognizing something was connected into the hdmi port anytime i connected the wires to the raspberry pi which means enough power was coming through it that it was running it just wasn't enough to start up and actually boot so because i didn't test it at lower power it might have done this at any current amount it might have just done this at 20 milliamps even either way i didn't have enough to get it to boot i was pretty discouraged and i went to bed at around 5 30. i woke up at 8 and went to work that whole day at work i was just wondering to myself do i have what it takes to keep going with this to get that last push up to 100 milliamps so i came home and i hooked my multimeter up to it and i was getting way more amperage so this morning at around 5 30 um i was hitting about 80 milliamps when i called it quits and i went to bed before getting up at eight to go to work and i pretty much you know was surrendered to the fact that it wasn't gonna work um but i check it with the multimeter and it says it's at 120 milliamps so either that was a fluke and it wasn't reading it properly or the only thing i could think would explain that would be um that as the potatoes decompose before my very eyes the starch continues to break down and it becomes less resistive resistant and so electricity is able to pass through it better that'll be the only thing i can think of that might cause that anyway with this room smelling more and more like fish every day from the decomposing potatoes i decided i'm gonna try this one more time and maybe this 120 milliamps just praying for a miracle at this point maybe that will do it and it will actually start up so it's unfortunate well that's at 109 and it's not working like who knows how much it's gonna need actually so i think it's not really worth it to keep trying to go and go and go at this point i was pretty much ready to just throw in the towel call it quits because i had no way of knowing at what point it was going to be enough mil amps to turn this on i pretty much had no option but to give up i spent the whole day at work with the intent to come home put away all the potatoes and not make a video about this but then when i got home i realized i could still run this on a trusty old ti-84 graphing calculator so i decided to give it another day before cleaning everything up and calling it quits the next day i went and got my hands on a ti-84 graphing calculator these things run on 5 volts and they use super low current anywhere from around 15 milliamps to 30 milliamps so i know i had plenty of power my main concern was is it going to be okay with a little less than 5 volts so i did a quick test i put all the batteries in except for one and then used a wire to connect the two terminals in the last battery slot because this would fool it into thinking that it has all the batteries in but it's still getting a little less voltage than what it's rated for and it worked but i still didn't know because nothing had worked so far so half of me was just like there's no way this is gonna work but i was gonna do everything i could to make this happen so i went ahead and i installed doom onto my calculator now that it was on here i was ready to give this a try this was my last effort this is the last thing i had up my sleeve if this didn't work it was basically a month's work down the drain and five straight days of hard work at this completely wasted but i was gonna give it everything i had so i went to plug it in okay i got it it smells so bad out here now like i have to breathe in through my hood because it is just awful out here like words cannot describe how bad it smells right now but i checked and it's still at around 110 milliamps as you can see graphing calculator no batteries in it just wires hook those wires up and as quick as possible too okay all right let's try turning it on it's on it's working all right look i told you i wasn't kidding it's disgusting that white stuff on it is mold that is a colony of something that i would like to eradicate very much all right so as you can see still no batteries only wires the wires plug into these it's probably still turned on yep still turned on okay quick let's get in the doom no time to waste oh it's not so bad once you get used to it i guess all right all right ladies and gentlemen we have doom running on potatoes oh right back into the action okay i can't believe it this is doom running on potatoes oh let's see who we got here oh he's angry oh he's running side to side now oh i'm sorry i'm not being dramatic here it is actually that bad okay i could oh respawn i could keep playing this pretty much indefinitely until i suffocate um as you know this is oh it's a barrel as you know this is probably whatever however many days i think it's five days now that these have been sitting out here so i'm gonna cut i'm still gonna be in this room i'm just gonna wrap things up real quick for a quick outro for you but doom running on potatoes that's right we just made history okay so i hate potatoes now and that's saying a lot i live in idaho but we got it working doom running on potatoes so how many potatoes does it take to run doom well it depends on what you're running doom on and it depends on how long you want to let your potatoes sit out i think that the peak was about was about um the peak was about maybe three days old age to perfection now it's just got too much culture maybe i'm not high society enough to appreciate this culture okay i think the fumes are getting in my head thank you for watching thank you for sharing this moment in history with me please don't ever try to do this yourself it's not worth it i feel i do not feel rewarded at all for this experience it punishes you it's an abusive relationship but i am going to clean this up thank you for watching i earned a subscribe here i earned the like i earned the share i earned it all and you know i did so do all that and be thankful that there are people like me out there cooking up hundreds of potatoes for you doing the real work you know stuff that benefits society with no reward in return for me um thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Equalo

Views: 1,549,915

Rating: 4.8614817 out of 5

Keywords: Can it run doom, doom on a potato, Doom, Potato power, potato powered pc, Doom TI-84, Doom TI-83, Potato powered computer, Will it run doom, potato electricity, potato doom, Running Doom, Doom on Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi on potatoes

Id: KFDlVgBMomQ

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Linktank]

This was interesting when he wasn't just going to do it on a calculator. Then 10 minutes in he reveals that he's just going to do it on a calculator. Cool.

[u/FormerWrap1552]

This is how we will first be able to play games after the apocolypse. Just potato and tobacco farms everywhere.

[u/I_want_the_gold]

this guy is an over dramatic bitch. but good job using podaders

[u/Ninja-Tech]

You should get a better power supply!

[u/TBGshxtALL-DAY]

I think Ireland has played this game IRL

Edit: I posted the comment before actually watching the video so I was referencing “Potato Doom”