Hobbyist installs Minecraft server on smart home lamp

Vimpo, a hobbyist and YouTuber, has realized a Minecraft server using an inexpensive smart home lamp from AliExpress. He used the microcontroller contained in the lamp, which offers enough performance to run a small Minecraft server on it.

Specifically, it is a BL602 microcontroller with a 32-bit RISC CPU clocked at 192 MHz. The processor has 128 KB of ROM and 276 KB of RAM available as memory. WLAN in the 2.4 GHz band and Bluetooth Low-Energy version 5.0 are also on board.

UCraft Mini Server

For the project, Vimpo uses the UCraft server, written in C, the Minecraft server, which he developed himself for computers with limited resources. However, full-fledged Minecraft games with all blocks and features cannot be realized with it. One option, for example, is to run the mini Minecraft game “TNT Run,” which Vimpo also uses in the demonstration video.

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The server binary is about 46 KB without authentication. With authentication, it is 90 KB. The required memory also depends on the number of Minecraft players. Theoretically, up to 1024 clients are possible, but this has not been tested, according to the description of UCraft on GitHub. With a realistic ten players, dynamic memory of 70 KB with authentication and 20 KB without is required.

Vimpo transferred the server code to the microcontroller using a USB interface. He then reconnected the LED lamp to the microcontroller. In the video, Vimpo shows a test game. The lamp reacts to keyboard input and lights up.

The project to realize a Minecraft server on a smart home lamp is available on GitHub under UCraft-bl602. However, a detailed description of the installation process is missing there.

(olb)