- Vimpo hosted a Minecraft server on a cheap AliExpress smart LED bulb
- The bulb used a BL602 RISC-V microcontroller running at 192 megahertz
- The microcontroller had 276 kilobytes of RAM and 128 kilobytes of ROM
A hardware enthusiast known as Vimpo has taken the phrase “can it run Doom?” to a new level by hosting a Minecraft server on a budget smart LED bulb.
The project began with an AliExpress-bought light bulb powered by a BL602 RISC-V microcontroller, a tiny chip with a single 192 MHz core, 276KB of RAM, and minimal I/O.
Despite such limited hardware, Vimpo has successfully turned the bulb into a fully functional game server.
From light source to host
The hardware hacker started by opening the bulb’s case and carefully removing its microcontroller.
Wires were then soldered to its headers and connected with a USB-to-serial adapter to establish a stable communication interface.
This setup allowed Vimpo to control the bulb, turning it on and off, before converting it into what he calls a “system” ready to host a Minecraft server.
Although the process looked more like tinkering with electronics than traditional web hosting, it essentially mimicked the logic behind remote server configuration.
The software side of the project was where the real challenge lay.
Running a Minecraft server on such limited hardware required a stripped down implementation called Ucraft.
Vimpo notes that the “binary size is approximately 46K bytes without authentication and 90K bytes with the authentication library.”
Even under the stress of ten players, total memory usage barely exceeded 70K bytes.
These numbers might impress anyone familiar with typical game server hosting requirements, yet Vimpo admits that Ucraft “lacks most, if not all, features of the vanilla server.”
While the server’s performance won’t replace professional Minecraft server hosting anytime soon, the experiment shows how flexible embedded systems can be.
The smart bulb essentially became a miniature web hosting device, though its capabilities remain more of a novelty than a practical breakthrough.
Still, this joins a growing list of unconventional engineering feats, from running ChatGPT-like AI models inside Minecraft to recreating the game using COBOL code.
Projects like Vimpo’s lightbulb server remind us that curiosity, not utility, often drives hardware innovation – in technology there is a thin line between creativity and absurdity, and modern game server hosting can be recreated at the smallest possible scale.
It might not light up the computer world, but it certainly lit up the idea of what “running Minecraft” might mean.
Via Tom’s Hardware
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