The YouTuber Boots Minecraft Server on a Smart Light Bulb
While the fun of making weird hardware run games has extended well beyond DOOM, YouTuber vimpro has shown that he could also set up a server for the popular title Minecraft on a lowly smart bulb.
Hardware A Single-Core Microcontroller
Unknown to its off-the-shelf manufacturer, the smart bulb operated on the BL602 microcontroller. Essentially, this chip's basic features are:
- Architecture: RISC-V
- Core: Single-core
- Clock Speed: 192 MHz
- RAM: 276 KB
How it Works server, not game client
Due to its limited power, the bulb hardware could not run the typical Minecraft game client. The blogger circumvented that limitation by modifying and installing Ucraft, a minimalistic but otherwise full-featured Minecraft server onto the bulb.
The setup turned out to be functional. According to the comments by the project's author, the smart bulb server can run three connected clients at once, and that does not seem to be a problem.
Skill Over Practicality
While the project demonstrates an important milestone in the field of engineering, its merit in application is not the main thing here. The creator suggests that its real-world applicability is up for discussion, thus answering clearly that this is a proof-of-concept project to show what limited hardware could achieve.
