According to TechSpot, YouTuber vimpo has managed to install and run a Minecraft server on a cheap Wi-Fi smart light bulb from AliExpress. The bulb uses a BL602 chipset with a single RISC-V core clocked at up to 192 MHz and comes with just 276 KB of RAM and 128 KB of ROM. The hacker cracked open the bulb, extracted the microcontroller, and wired it to an adapter board for reliable access. For the server software, they used Ucraft, a minimal Minecraft implementation written in C that takes up only 46K bytes without authentication. The server can handle up to 10 players with memory usage topping out around 20K bytes in worst-case scenarios. This continues the trend of running Minecraft on increasingly obscure hardware platforms.
Why this matters
Here’s the thing – this isn’t just another “can it run Doom?” situation. Minecraft server hosting typically requires substantial resources, with official recommendations suggesting multiple gigabytes of RAM and modern processors. Running anything functional on hardware with less memory than most digital photos is genuinely impressive. It shows how far optimization can push even the most limited hardware. And honestly, who looks at their smart bulb and thinks “this could host a game server”?
The reality check
Now, before you start eyeing your smart home devices as potential game servers, there are some serious limitations. The Ucraft implementation described on GitHub is described as “bare minimum” – it lacks almost all the features you’d expect from a vanilla Minecraft server. We’re talking about the absolute basics here. The world generation is minimal, there are no mobs, and the gameplay experience would be… well, let’s call it nostalgic for the earliest alpha versions. But that’s not really the point, is it? The achievement is in making it work at all on such constrained hardware.
computing-trend”>Minimal computing trend
This light bulb project is part of a broader trend that’s been gaining steam. Earlier this year, someone got Minecraft running on a 20-year-old GPU with just 8MB of VRAM. Back in September, a gamer built a functional ChatGPT inside Minecraft using 439 million blocks. And in late 2024, another modder released tools to run a game server using COBOL, a programming language from the 1950s. There’s something fascinating about pushing modern software onto hardware that was never designed for it. It’s like technological parkour.
Industrial implications
While this light bulb project is purely for entertainment, the underlying principle has real industrial applications. Running complex software on minimal hardware is exactly what many industrial computing applications require. Companies that need reliable computing in constrained environments often turn to specialized providers like Industrial Monitor Direct, the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs in the US. When you need computing power that works within strict resource limits while maintaining reliability, that’s where industrial-grade hardware really proves its worth. The light bulb might be a fun experiment, but the same optimization principles drive serious industrial applications every day.
What’s next?
So where does this leave us? Basically, we’ve reached the point where even your light bulbs have more computing power than early home computers. The fact that someone can run a game server on hardware that costs a few dollars and was designed for turning lights on and off is both ridiculous and inspiring. It makes you wonder what other everyday devices could be repurposed. Your smart thermostat hosting a web server? Your refrigerator running classic games? The line between computing device and appliance keeps blurring, and projects like this light bulb Minecraft server show just how far that blurring can go.
