Is it potential for digital devices to have an excessive amount of energy? Some will reply the query with a definitive ‘no’ in a Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor-esque method, whereas others will level out the silliness of getting a microcontroller in a toothbrush and the rising drawback of e-waste. No matter facet of that fence you end up on, there isn’t any query that our units are loaded with extra highly effective parts than ever earlier than, so we might as nicely take advantage of them.
{Hardware} hacker Aaron Christophel has been constructing a reputation for himself doing precisely that. He has taken a break from hacking on good rings and Disney MagicBands to repurpose one other system for an unlikely software. This time, Christophel is working with an Anker Prime Charging Station. Now, you may not count on a gadget that costs your USB units to have an LCD show, not to mention a pair of highly effective processors, however that’s precisely what the Prime Charging Station has to supply.
The entrance of the system has a 200×480-pixel decision LCD show, and contained in the case is an ESP32-C3 microcontroller and a Synwit SWM34S system-on-a-chip (SoC) with 8MB of SDRAM and 16MB of exterior flash reminiscence. It hardly appears proper utilizing all that {hardware} simply to cost your cellphone, so Christophel determined that it also needs to play Doom.
With its plentiful assets, the query was by no means actually “can it play Doom,” however moderately “how can I get it to play Doom.” After digging into some documentation, it was found that the Synwit SoC was the one chip linked to the show, so Christophel hooked up a number of debugging wires to the internals of the system to load the software program for execution on this Arm processor.
Other than loading the software program, no modification of the Prime Charging Station was wanted. It is ready to run the sport very easily and is sort of playable, though the person interface is way from excellent. There is just one click on wheel, so transferring, turning, utilizing objects, and firing the weapon all contain completely different combos of twisting or urgent the wheel. The system does help Bluetooth, nonetheless, so maybe sooner or later somebody would possibly sneak in keyboard help for a greater expertise.
Whereas it is a very cool hack, it’s certainly not the strangest system we now have ever seen working Doom. That title would possibly simply go to considered one of Christophel’s previous hacks — this electrical toothbrush. If you wish to attempt to steal the crown, be sure you present us what you will have hacked Doom onto!
