Here’s how you can use your Game Boy Classic to fly a drone

Do you want to put your old Game Boy to use? While some may try to boot it up for the first time in decades, others may stare and wonder how we played so many of our childhood games on that brick.

For Gautier Hattenberger, the first thing that came to mind was, “Can I fly a drone with this?” 

During the process, he noted that is wasn’t so simple to hook his Game Boy to his WiFi-based drone. While much of the hardware for Game Boys is documented online, allowing for a community to create software on old devices, much of it was incomplete, leaving enthusiasts to fill in the blanks.

To transform his Game Boy into a flight controller, Hattenberger turned the Game Link into a USB by using an Arduino platform and FTDI semiconductor combination. This allowed him to hook up his laptop with the drone software.

The code he used can be found here:

• gameboy: run make to build the gameboy binary (PprzOnGB.gb), need to unpuck GBDK with tar -xzf gbdk-2.96a-i586-pc-linux2.2.tar.gz
• ems-flasher: flash the gameboy binary using ems-flasher init and fetch submodule with git submodule init and git submodule update
• programmable gameboy cards can be found here: http://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/usb-64m-smart-card
• arduino: compile and flash arduino program (converts gamelink to serial) using arduino IDE (https://www.arduino.cc/)
• install Paparazzi UAV (http://wiki.paparazziuav.org/wiki/Installation) and use gb2ivy.py tool (insw/ground_segment/joystick folder)

Watch his demonstration video below:

Via Gizmodo