Jun 22, 2022 20:00:00

Finally, a fierce man who plays DOOM on Lego blocks appears

A person who succeeded in playing the popular FPS 'DOOM' released in 1995 using a liquid crystal monitor built into the block of 'Lego', which is synonymous with block toys, has appeared and has become a hot topic.

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

It was James Brown, who lives in New Zealand, who remade Lego as a monitor. On June 7, 2022, Mr. Brown posted on Twitter how the Lego block functions as a monitor, and it attracted a lot of people's attention.

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

The Lego block modified by Mr. 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

It's hidden inside the block like this.

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

In addition, Mr. Brown says that he uses STM32F030F4P6 (Cortex M0, 16K flash, 4K ram) for the processor and QT1306P82 (0.42 inch OLED) for the monitor.

After that, Mr. Brown made further improvements to the first block he created ...

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

I created a block that is more opaque and looks closer to the blue color of Lego.

The new one is more opaque and a closer match 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 you to move the displayed image from side to side.

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

In addition, the resolution of the monitor that Mr. Brown built in the Lego block is 72 × 40 pixels, and the number of colors is 1 bpp .