LEDs Archives

AppWizard

January 6, 2026

Asus’ colossal new gaming PC has a two-inch-thick door, holographic fans, and a hood scoop

The Asus G1000 gaming PC features a unique design with holographic 'fans,' a hood scoop for cooling, and a thick side panel. It is equipped with an Asus Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and 2TB of SSD storage. The cooling system includes a 420mm AIO liquid cooler, a 140mm fan at the base, front-mounted fans, and an exhaust fan at the rear. The holographic 'fans' consist of spinning light strips with 680 LEDs, creating a lighting effect rather than circulating air. The design includes two smaller holographic displays and a larger side panel display, all within a hinged glass panel. The current version is a prototype with no confirmed release date or pricing.

AppWizard

November 11, 2025

Hardware hacker installs Minecraft server on a cheap smart lightbulb — single 192 MHz RISC-V core with 276KB of RAM, enough to run tiny 90K byte world

A hardware hacker named Vimpo installed a Minecraft server on a budget-friendly smart lightbulb, utilizing the bulb's BL602 RISC-V-powered microcontroller. Vimpo disassembled an LED bulb from AliExpress, soldered connections to its headers, and used a USB-to-serial adapter for communication. The software aspect involved using Ucraft, a compact implementation available on GitHub, which has a binary size of approximately 46K bytes without authentication and 90K bytes with it. Memory usage varies with active players, reaching a maximum of around 70K bytes with 10 players connected. Ucraft, however, lacks most features of the vanilla server.

AppWizard

August 31, 2025

Gamer Creates 3D-Printed Minecraft Compass That Points North in the Real World

The Minecraft compass, created by maker chaosgoo on GitHub, is a 3D-printed handheld device that functions as a real-world compass while mimicking the game's design. It requires a 3D printer and features a casing designed to reflect the game's pixelated aesthetic. The compass uses a thin, semi-transparent acrylic panel and a grid of WS2812B LEDs to illuminate a red needle that moves in sync with the device's directional capabilities, provided by an ESP32C3 microcontroller and a digital magnetometer sensor. It includes a "spawn point" mode for custom locations and a "Nether mode" that simulates the game's chaotic needle movement. The device is powered by a 500mAh battery and offers configuration options via WiFi or Bluetooth, with a single multifunction button for operation. The GitHub repository provides open-source files, firmware instructions, and pre-built firmware options.