For a few years, the ruler by which hackers had been measured was their capacity to run Doom on obscure and closely resource-constrained {hardware}. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly on all the pieces from vapes to bicycle GPS items. However plainly this job is now getting too simple. May it’s that even disposable electronics now have such an overabundance of computing sources that working a first-person shooter from the mid-Nineties is now not the problem that it as soon as was?
Eradicating the microcontroller (📷: vimpo)
Which may simply be the case. However relaxation assured, a brand new gauntlet has been thrown down with the intention to nonetheless showcase your loopy hacking abilities. The brand new problem: spinning up a Minecraft server the place no Minecraft server ought to ever go. We’ve already seen a minimal server working on an ESP32 just lately. Now, vimpo has give you the brilliant thought to run a Minecraft server on an IoT gentle bulb.
When you see contained in the bulb, this feat might not appear fairly so stunning. Beneath the duvet is a BL602 RISC-V-powered microcontroller. In fact it nonetheless takes plenty of effort to squeeze all the pieces into the constraints of this chip. vimpo developed a minimal implementation of a Minecraft server in C referred to as Ucraft. This shrunk the footprint of the software program down to some tens of kilobytes, which allowed it to work throughout the bounds of the microcontroller’s restricted reminiscence and space for storing.
To get the server working, vimpo first eliminated the microcontroller module from the bulb. New firmware was then flashed to it with the assistance of a USB-to-serial adapter. After that, the microcontroller was soldered again in place with a brand new mission in life — serving up Minecraft worlds.
The worlds could also be restricted — in dimension, obtainable gadgets, and nearly all the pieces else — however the necessary factor is that this does work. And it seems like it really works fairly properly. Gameplay seems to be snappy, which is kind of an accomplishment for the reason that world is being served up by a lightweight bulb. Do you may have any concepts for what you want to see Minecraft server working on? What’s the subsequent frontier?
