can a potato be powered by a switch
w o a h .....
I am less familiar with plant biology but similar questions have been asked, we will not need a fully grown as per supermarket potato
The tiny switch battery is not doing to store that much energy, even before we take into account self discharge.
That could however have multiple meanings
Standard LCD screen technology is just a white light and any colours are from blocking rather than from generation so no great hopes there. I will stop short of the later thing wondering if we can cannibalise another part of the system to create a phosphor at the correct wavelength, we will return to cannibalising the thing though.
The battery part above reckons 400W for 3 months for a 1m^2 section so we will reduce that to a single plant. Even assuming the 10W active power from before is true and all goes to the screen that is a rather large difference. Train the plant to use the screen area far closer and
reckons 5-10 potatoes for a single plant. I don't know if we can abort potatoes like you can prune a grape vine or apple tree, or indeed if you can do something like debarking an apple tree but I imagine you can if the energy is not enough to sustain growth for a more conventional yield.
Similarly we might have to look into whether there is a current limiting resistor on the screen we can reduce to pump the brightness up a bit at the cost of ultimate lifetime.
Of course there are further alternatives.
Obviously you can make any elements via fusion and/or a particle accelerator but that is a bit silly. Similarly you can probably do some fairly extensive chemistry to break down the carbons in the switch case and such to form a suitable soil analogue but that is also a bit silly.
Drawing a line at a modest school type lab (basic solvents, acids, bases, nitrates) and without doing much more than adding a simple methyl, hydroxyl or nitrate group to a device we are again back to wondering if you could use the decomposition products and/or other aspects of the switch to generate a soil analogue. Another way to phrase it might be if you were in the Martian could you sacrifice your switch.
covers the nutrients obtained from soil.
There it was found PC-ABS aka polycarbonate-abs makes up the switch case.
polycarbonate is basic oxygen, carbon and hydrogen
Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene
Does include some Nitrogen in that. Even at perfect yields it is unlikely to produce a suitable amount so we might be left to pull it out of the air, and we might also have to consider the state of the relevant bacteria. We also have to source the potassium and phosphorous for this. I know I said basic lab before and while we could probably scare up some potassium permanganate (those purple crystals you might have put in water to see convection currents) and baking powder aka calcium phosphate it would be cheating under the restrictions imposed at the start.
The battery might be the next step. However https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/dwQNOROQBb6VLJas.huge
says li-ion. Unknown then what chemistry we are dealing with -- Lithium hexafluorophosphate or lithium-iron-phosphate are ones which might source some phosphorous but if it is PAN or a more conventional plastic we are not going to get anywhere.
We could get a bit more hardcore and start https://www.thoughtco.com/volume-chemical-composition-of-blood-601962
but I am not sure how much of the P and K is locked up in bones (the remains of cremation are usually salts of such chemicals, and if you have picked up such a thing you will know how light they are).
Even without this we also have sulfur, magnesium, and calcium to consider, and the volumes are enough to note in this.
EOF so song
Video version (vevo so censored)