This Mod Turns A Game Boy Into A Drone Controller - Here's How It Works

Sooner or later, most gamers have to decide what to do with consoles that are no longer relevant. Some people hide them away in a cupboard or donate them to charity, but it's difficult: There can be sadness to retiring an old console. Occasionally, though, someone rejects obsolescence entirely and gives outdated hardware a new lease on life. In 2016, an unmanned aerial vehicle enthusiast (UAV) named Gautier Hattenberger rediscovered his original Game Boy at his parent's house and turned it into a functional drone controller. 

In a video that's as inspiring as it is surreal, Hattenberger shows the decades-old handheld being used to rotate, steer, and land a Parrot ARDrone 2.0 in real time. To make it happen, think back to trading Pokémon using a link cable and a Game Boy, which sends and receives bits of data via the link port. Hattenberger created a modified link cable and connected the Game Boy to an Arduino, capturing signals being transmitted. This data was then passed through an FTDI chip to his laptop's USB port. After coding a small program that mapped the Game Boy's inputs to commands for the UAV, Hattenberger's drone was ready to fly.

There was one small compromise that had to be made. The original Game Boy's link port was only designed to handle 1KB/s of traffic, well below what's needed for live streaming video. As such, it's not possible to view the drone's camera on the Game Boy, only via the laptop. That said, Game Boy games look worse than you remember and only support a screen resolution of 160x144 pixels, so the experience likely wouldn't have been great anyway. Despite this, Hattenberger's controller is arguably the most impressive achievement in Game Boy-powered aviation to date.

Perhaps it's the nostalgia factor, but people seem determined to continue hacking and repurposing the Game Boy today. Its warm, 8-bit sound means it's a popular choice for creating chiptune music and industrious hackers have gone as far as turning the Game Boy Camera into a working webcam, installing a backlight, and even adding partial Wi-Fi support.

Aside from aging hardware, one of the factors impacting how far the Game Boy can be pushed is its small (by modern standards) number of inputs. That's why one of the first steps towards using a Raspberry Pi mod to emulate classic titles on a Game Boy is adding extra buttons. If you like to learn and hate getting rid of old hardware, consider modding your Game Boy. As Hattenberger proved, aside from bitrate, the only real limitation is what you can imagine.