Fly a Drone With Your Old Game Boy

The original Game Boy is one of the most iconic gaming systems of all time and as such, continues to inspire the internet to utilize both its aesthetic and its hardware in new and creative ways. There's just something about it, the weight, the feel of the buttons, watching the Nintendo logo scroll down that screen when you first boot up a game, that can't quite be described if you weren't able to experience it as a kid. That same nostalgia is what led Gautier Hattenberger to give his old Game Boy a breath of fresh air.

A Game Boy is a fairly simple computer, lending itself quite handily to all manner of hacking and modding. As mods go, Hattenberger's is actually fairly simple. By modifying the Game Boy's game link port, he was able to utilize a small Arduino interface to convert the Game Boy's controller output to a USB compatible signal. That signal fed into a laptop that converted the inputs into actual control commands sent to the drone (a Parrot ARDrone 2.0). So yeah, the Game Boy is functioning as purely the controller here and requires the laptop as a go-between, but I would imagine the thrill of flying a drone with your old Game Boy is no less awesome for it.

While I will never do this (I still rock Pokemon Red and Blue on my original Game Boy), you can give it a try yourself by reading more details over at Hattenberger's blog, or by playing with all of the files and source code for the controller software via his Github page.

[via Motherboard]