Doom on a chip from a IKEA LED smart lamp | Hacker News Reader

Doom on a chip from a IKEA LED smart lamp

uk.pcmag.com

135 pointsmodinfo64 comments

>The system runs a downsized version of Doom that requires less RAM.

You could even say it's a...light-weight DOOM.

I'll see myself out.

(In all seriousness though, super impressive work! It always amazes me what computing power actually resides in what we deem to be "simple" devices these days - in some ways it feels like computing power gone to waste.)

Now the question is, how many Software Engineers does it take...To change the Software on the light bulb :-)

I laughed then I stopped in a kind of shock because I realised that's becoming a sane and reasonable question.

That's easy, one. But you also have to pay for the scrum master, product owner, bti engineer, test engineer, architect, and 7 other roles that keep the software engineer from rolling out the update ;).

I actually felt a little bad when I electrified my son's play kitchen to add lights and went for an Arduino Nano. That's a bunch of lights along with some programming (microwave timer and state machine, dimming when idle, undimming upon any input, PWM brightness control for the burners) running on a 16 MHz µC, which is most likely overkill for that. On the other hand it was cheap and programming it was accessible.

The interesting thing is that the microcontroller in the Nano - Atmega328P - is really a massive overkill but for a wholy different reason: price.

Even back in 2015 the AVR based Atmega328P was more expensive than quite a few Cortex M0 based STM32 offerings (when comparing price for same quantities of course). And those MCUs had literaly by an order of magnitude bigger SRAM and the ARM core and STM32 peripheries vere obscenly more capable and I cannot stress this enough. Now the difference is even bigger and AVR based MCU are expensive almost-unobtanium for legacy designs.

Calling AVR MCUs cheap is my trigger since 2015 when I and my collegues were browsing Farnell eshop looking for a cheap MCUs for various gizmos we were working on.

A year ago (312 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27498789

Many of the links are dead. The technical details:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...

What amuses me is that I remember a time where only “powerful” computers could run doom in full screen, whereas others had to settle with playing Wolfenstein 3D, and now Doom is the smallest game we use for these hacks :-)

Well if it can't run doom it might run Bad Apple

Or perhaps wolfenstein

Or perhaps Bad Apple

Eh, or perhaps Wolfenstein?

:-)

Or possibly catacombs 3d?

What is this, Reddit?

It's pretty crazy that a lamp, even though it's a smart lamp, must have such a powerful processor.

It could be that they just use the same processor for multiple products even if it is overpowered to be able to reduce cost in acquiry, hardware design and software development.

Still crazy for a mass product.

It's even more crazy to realize back in the days we were able to make entire games that could run on hardware like this.

...and then use the same hardware for office tasks.

...and were amazed we could do any of it at all.

You're right. Kids today have it easy. They can just go and pick a cheap 64 bit ARM cpu off the shelf and call it a day. We had no such luxuries!

This gets said all the time, but what do people expect? Chips that can run doom are basically the bottom tier chip now. There is no point making lower power chips because they would use the same physical resources to produce.

Do you find it odd that most people buy chairs capable of supporting 200kg when they know that no one over 100kg will ever sit on it?

The latter is overengineering for safety, using a fast chip isn't. But I imagine it's the cheapest, small SoC that offers bluetooth or wifi, or whatever a "smart" lamp needs. If someone wants to rail against the need for smart lamps, however, they'd have a point.

Ikea uses zigbee. Better for this purpose than wifi or BT (but sadly not much).

A Cortex-M33 microcontroller costs like a coffee, and much less that that for Ikea that can then sell more lamps and at a higher margin, because people like introducing more complications in their lives, like software updates for what used to be a wire and a switch.

> Do you find it odd that most people buy chairs capable of supporting 200kg when they know that no one over 100kg will ever sit on it?

it solved through more materials or technologies per $ input. Chairs that can support more mass require non-trivial production and/or rare materials. You likely can produce a chair out of titanium or carbon fabric that could support more weight. There're no chairs that are both cheap and can support variety of use cases.

>Do you find it odd that most people buy chairs capable of supporting 200kg when they know that no one over 100kg will ever sit on it?

I guess you never had sex on a chair.

or partner/kids sitting on top of you

That is not really accurate. There are plenty of chips being made that are less powerful. Such as the Epson S1C60 which is a 4-bit MCU capable of running at a whopping 1MHz frequency

Is it materially cheaper? Pennies per device isn’t going to be particularly compelling in this application, if it even is cheaper to begin with.

Also at too low power, it might not be able to perform the “smart” aspects of the light

Chairs are given large safety margins, and designed to accommodate a wide range of people. Chips also have safety margins, but chips are not chairs, and there are other forces causing overpowered ARMs to be put into simple electronics, namely prevalence and mass production bringing the price down to pennies, so much so that it costs far less to develop some high level code for an cheap overpowered ARM chip than develop some more specialised embedded code for more "appropriately" sized microcontroller for the job. Sometimes things will still sway back to the specialised chips when things like power constraints or more specific hardware features carry enough weight for the purpose.

Perhaps the cost of programming the smaller chips is high enough to offset it

It's not particlarly powerful by modern standards. The processor in question is an ARM Cortex M33, which is available with single or dual 32-bit cores, at clock speeds of 150 to 240 MHz. But when Doom was first released, a typical PC would only have run at 66 MHz.

You might not need that kind of processing power continuously, but consider that the lamp has to connect to WiFi securely, then talk to your smart home HUB securely, meaning setting up TLS connections, and you want it to respond to commands in much less than a second, you want that kind of processing power in bursts.

We do not need a processor this powerful to do this at all. Garage door openers have been around for ages and the only novel thing here is the strength of the encryption, which could be done in hardware.

It's simply that this is "easy" because these chips are plentiful and cheap enough.

The stories of Russia harvesting chips from washing machines and dryers to put into munitions systems[1][2] demonstrates just how much "excess" there is in terms of compute power in the average smart device.

[1]: https://www.techspot.com/news/94589-russian-tanks-using-chip...

[2]: https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/a-review-of-t...

This particular one doesn't do WiFi, just ZigBee...they have a separate bridge box for that.

It is a fairly pricey choice for what it's doing...$5-6 per piece for single unit purchases.

And yet i purchased a number of LEDs with mr16 gu5.3 bulbs just like the photo from TFA, and none of them work well in the minimum dimmer settings, they're all way too bright.

Maybe I've got it all wrong and i should have played doom on them instead.

You want your "smart" lamp to respond quickly to reduce power consumption and air time. Just a short sprint once is a while instead of a slower 8 bit cpu crunching on algorithms designed around 32 bit operations. The wider ALU and registers are cheap. The fetch and decode logic is almost identical in area and uses less power because you can implement your application executing fewer instructions. Have a look at the code size produced by common C compilers for something like AES128 targeting a Cortex M0+ (or M33 in this case) and a ATmega. You'll see lots of short helper functions that depending on compiler settings are either called very often, inlined or even inlined and unrolled.

The MCH2022 badge will have a (downsized) version of DOOM running on the ice40 FPGA (implementing a RISK-V core) and a RP2040 (just for reading the buttons).

The RP2040 alone could run doom well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30672527

Yes, and the ESP32 too. Seems this is going to be the first badge with three processors that all can run Doom. On the MCH2022 badge, the RP2040 has no direct connection with display (except for regulating the back-light), so you would have to implement some bridge on the ESP32 or the FPGA. See block diagram on https://bodge.team/docs/badges/mch2022/

>RISK-V

RISC-V.

Interesting to see the manufacturing similarities between that and another smart bulb I tore apart a few months ago. Same cutout for the antenna, which sticks out the front. Same aluminum backed circuit board for heat dissipation, and same strange through hole socket for connecting the power, data, and lighting boards.

I find it suspicious the video is now private, or is that just me...

I am now eager to see it running on neuralink

[flagged]

> Yet now I am unwelcome in your home?!?

One time I had to gently tell a friend that he was exceeding the weight limit of the IKEA kneeling chair he was sitting on.

Really awkward for the both of us.

If that was me, I would rather have let them break the chair instead.

For real. Fuck the $5 chair. Go get another one when it breaks. Famous quote... 'never risk a friendship over Ikea furniture.'

.. unhealthy how? I'm 184 cm and I feel bloated at 72kg already aha, I don't see three more centimeters adding up to 25kg

>Yet now I am unwelcome in your home?!?

There are people that weight over 200kg, why draw the line at 100?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31882142.

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