Minecraft’s reputation for running on almost anything just got a new benchmark. A hardware enthusiast known as vimpo has successfully turned a cheap Wi-Fi light bulb into a functioning Minecraft server, continuing the game’s long-running tradition of being installed on unlikely hardware.
The experiment, documented on YouTube and reported by Tom’s Hardware, used a budget smart bulb purchased from AliExpress. The device is powered by a BL602 chipset, which includes a single RISC-V core clocked at up to 192 MHz, 276 KB of RAM, and 128 KB of ROM—specifications far below even the most modest single-board computers.
Vimpo disassembled the bulb, extracted its microcontroller, and connected it to an adapter board for stable power and data access. Once set up with external inputs and a display, the hacker installed a minimalist Minecraft server implementation called Ucraft, written in the C programming language.
Ucraft is designed for extreme efficiency. Its server binary is just 46 KB without authentication (or 90 KB with authentication enabled). Memory consumption depends on player count, peaking at roughly 20 KB of heap memory for ten unauthenticated users or 70 KB for authenticated sessions. The result is a stripped-down version of Minecraft capable of handling basic gameplay interactions on hardware meant to power a light bulb.
The accomplishment continues Minecraft’s growing lineage of improbable ports and experiments. In recent months, modders have made headlines by running the game on a 20-year-old GPU with only 8 MB of VRAM, and even building a fully functional ChatGPT model inside Minecraft using more than 439 million blocks. Another developer went as far as hosting a Minecraft server using COBOL, a programming language from the 1950s originally designed for business applications.
While vimpo’s light bulb project lacks the visual and gameplay fidelity of a standard server, it underscores the adaptability of both Minecraft’s architecture and the ingenuity of its modding community. As with the classic trend of running Doom on every conceivable device, Minecraft’s “it runs anywhere” legacy continues to expand—this time, with the glow of a Wi-Fi light bulb.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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