Jun 22, 2022 20:00:00

Finally, a brave man appears to play DOOM on Lego blocks

DOOM , released in 1993, is known as a landmark of first-person shooter action games. It is also famous for being ported to all sorts of platforms, including tractor in-vehicle systems , medical ultrasound scanners , and Windows Notepad , as its source code has been made public. Now, someone has succeeded in using an LCD monitor that incorporates DOOM into LEGO blocks, the block toy synonymous with the block toy.

I wired the brick up as a very small external monitor, so you can, for instance, play Doom on it. pic.twitter.com/uWK2Uw7Egr
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 19, 2022

James Brown, a resident of New Zealand, remade Lego into a monitor. On June 7, 2022, Brown posted on Twitter how Lego blocks function as monitors, attracting a lot of attention.

Very happy about this. pic.twitter.com/1FofmKbqJP
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 7, 2022

The Lego block modified by Brown contains the following board and ultra-small monitor ...

Here's the bare circuit pic.twitter.com/v0TOqzikkP
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 7, 2022

This is how it is hidden inside the block.

… goes into a little 3D printed form pic.twitter.com/lwE0hVN07U
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 7, 2022

Brown said he is using an STM32F030F4P6 (Cortex M0, 16K flash, 4K ram) processor and a QT1306P82 (0.42-inch OLED) monitor.

Brown has since made further improvements to the blocks he created initially.

I haven't shared the schematic because it contains an error; you need to rework the boards to route a spare gpio to the screen. This involves drilling a 0.3mm hole through one of the pads, making a break in the ground plane, and soldering a little piece of wire through. pic.twitter.com/hG5MfYq8N4
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 8, 2022

We created a brick that is more opaque and appears closer to the Lego blue color.

The new one is more opaque and a match closer to Lego Blue. I also painted the edges of the screen with black lacquer, which got rid of the glowing surround. It's a very fiddly construction. If I'm going to make more, I need to work on tooling. pic.twitter.com/2AEfSogIfU
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 12, 2022

In addition, the new block is equipped with a capacitive touch panel, which allows the displayed image to be moved left and right.

While that one cures, I added the trench run and got capacitive touch working in the studs. pic.twitter.com/dxzEw2uDI9
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 11, 2022

The monitor that Brown built into the Lego block has a resolution of 72x40 pixels and a color depth of 1 bpp .