For many years, the ruler by which hackers were measured was their ability to run Doom on obscure and heavily resource-constrained hardware. We’ve seen this play out time and again on everything from vapes to bicycle GPS units. But it seems that this task is now getting too easy. Could it be that even disposable electronics now have such an overabundance of computing resources that running a first-person shooter from the mid-1990s is no longer the challenge that it once was?
Removing the microcontroller (📷: vimpo)
That might just be the case. But rest assured, a new gauntlet has been thrown down so that you can still show off your crazy…
For many years, the ruler by which hackers were measured was their ability to run Doom on obscure and heavily resource-constrained hardware. We’ve seen this play out time and again on everything from vapes to bicycle GPS units. But it seems that this task is now getting too easy. Could it be that even disposable electronics now have such an overabundance of computing resources that running a first-person shooter from the mid-1990s is no longer the challenge that it once was?
Removing the microcontroller (📷: vimpo)
That might just be the case. But rest assured, a new gauntlet has been thrown down so that you can still show off your crazy hacking skills. The new challenge: spinning up a Minecraft server where no Minecraft server should ever go. We have already seen a minimal server running on an ESP32 recently. Now, vimpo has come up with the bright idea to run a Minecraft server on an IoT light bulb.
Once you see inside the bulb, this feat may not seem quite so surprising. Underneath the cover is a BL602 RISC-V-powered microcontroller. Of course it still takes a lot of effort to squeeze everything into the constraints of this chip. vimpo developed a minimal implementation of a Minecraft server in C called Ucraft. This shrunk the footprint of the software down to a few tens of kilobytes, which allowed it to work within the bounds of the microcontroller’s limited memory and storage space.
To get the server working, vimpo first removed the microcontroller module from the bulb. New firmware was then flashed to it with the help of a USB-to-serial adapter. After that, the microcontroller was soldered back in place with a new mission in life — serving up Minecraft worlds.
The worlds may be limited — in size, available items, and just about everything else — but the important thing is that this does work. And it looks like it works quite well. Gameplay appears to be snappy, which is quite an accomplishment since the world is being served up by a light bulb. Do you have any ideas for what you would like to see Minecraft server running on? What is the next frontier?