Turtius' Canon EOS 200D Digital Camera Has a Bonus Feature: a Built-In Minecraft Server
Combining the Magic Lantern firmware for custom code execution and the avrcraft Minecraft server, this Canon is no longer just a camera.
Mojang's Minecraft is a game which has been ported to a variety of platforms — but pseudonymous programmer Turtius has taken it somewhere entirely new: a Canon EOS 200D digital SLR camera.
"This is a modified copy of magiclantern_simplified to run a Minecraft server using avrcraft on the [Canon] 200D only," Turtius writes of his work, referring to an open source project designed to bring new features to Canon cameras. "Magic Lantern is used here to gain code execution on the CPU. This was an investigation for the network module on this camera to ease debugging (i.e a network debugger) but the Minecraft server itself was just those 'what if' moments."
Turtius' project blends the Magic Lantern code, allowing custom software to run on the Canon camera processor, with avrcraft, a Minecraft server written for 8-bit AVR devices. "The main motivation," he explains, "was to reverse engineer the networking processor used by Canon."
When running the Minecraft server, the camera is still functional for its intended purpose: "But barely," Turtius admits. "It crashes sometimes" when taking photos or videos with the Minecraft server running on the background."
The source code for Turtius' work is available, but comes with a clear message: "THIS IS A DRAFT (BODGE), I DON'T RECOMMEND RUNNING THIS WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT YOU'RE DOING AS THIS COULD DESTROY YOUR CAMERA," the coder warns. "I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU ATTEMPT THIS AND YOUR CAMERA BREAKS, TRY THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK."
If that warning isn't enough to dissuade you, the source code is available on GitHub under the GNU General Public License 2.0.
