The original Game Boy is the portable gaming system that had millions of teens staring at a screen before smartphones were a concept. Though it’s mostly a relic now, one clever gamer gave the device a new lease on life by turning it into a controller for a drone.
Gautier Hattenberger shared his plans to turn Nintendo’s popular portable gaming platform into a Wi-Fi based drone controller on the Paparazzi UAV Blog—a publication focused on research and development of open-source UAV systems—back at the start of August.
He managed to get the concept up and running (or flying) after a fair amount of manipulation to the classic game playing brick.
He turned the Game Link port, which was used to connect Game Boys together for multiplayer play, into a USB port using an Arduino—a single-board microcontroller similar to the popular Raspberry Pi—and a FTDI semiconductor.
Once Hattenberger finished the modifications, he was able to connect the Game Boy to his laptop and use it to interact with the drone software that converts button presses into actual commands for his Parrot ARDrone2.
Hattenberger shared the code for the project on GitHub so if you have a classic Game Boy, a bit of technical knowhow, and a lot of free time, you can take a crack at the project yourself. Just know that the alternative outcome to the project is a ruined Game Boy.
H/T Gizmodo
