Ikea’s Trådfri lamp has enough power to play Doom on it

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If you are not afraid to work with a small soldering iron and precision mechanic’s tools, you can use the following find to build a Doom gaming console from an Ikea lamp.

First things first – Doom doesn’t just run on an Ikea lamp. By the time you get to that point, you’ve invested a few euros and a lot of time. But it is possible.

The hobbyists at next-hack.com were looking for a device that is common in everyday life and that could easily be made to run the legendary shooter Doom with some effort. She was inspired by the claim that Doom was also on a pregnancy test. In retrospect, however, it turned out to be wrong.

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In the end, they decided on the Ikea Trådfri LED1923R5 GU10 RGB lamp. This includes a mini board with an 80 megahertz Cortex-M33 processor, supported by 108 kilobytes of working memory and one megabyte of flash memory.

Based on a list of the data, which Doom level needs at least how much memory, the next hackers found out that they had to get at least the first level to work on the Ikea lamp. The assumption about working memory later turned out to be wrong for various reasons, which the hobbyists took as an opportunity to dig deeper – ultimately with success.

In addition to the lamp, the Doom enthusiasts also got a 1.8-inch TFT color display, a memory module with eight megabytes of capacity and an external keyboard that only occupied the minimum number of eight keys.

Using detailed and illustrated instructions that the hobbyists on this website published, you could now disassemble the Ikea lamp – because you only need the circuit board with the voltage converter soldered on the back.

At the end there is a Doom installation, which in most areas runs at 30 frames per second and in particularly complex representations it still runs at over 20 frames per second. The usefulness of the solution is – as always – to be questioned, but if you have a lot of time and inclination to do handicrafts, use the instructions for inspiration and maybe next realize Doom on an automatic vacuum cleaner or a garden irrigation – the ideas are hardly limited.

You can see for yourself with this collection of the craziest devices that hobbyists have got Doom up and running.

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