Modder manages to hack Doom onto “smart” plant pot

A hardware modder and YouTuber has managed to get an almost playable version of Doom running on a plant pot. No really.

YouTuber and hardware modder Aaron Christophel has made a name for himself by hacking Doom into all sorts of weird and wonderful devices. Ranging from the ‘Doomed Toothbrush’ to putting Doom on an adult device. His latest project involves putting Doom on a plant pot.

Christophel purchased a small ‘smart planter’ from AliExpress. This device is designed to keep track of the health of the plant within and alert the owner to what care the plant needs with cute expressions on the front screen.

Obviously, Christophel had a different purpose in mind for the display screen. The smart planter contained an ESP32 with 8MB of flash memory and 8MB of external RAM. As such, Christophel did not find it much of a challenge to install Doom on the device, when compared to his previous projects.

Christophel described the device as “A joke” saying the base was too small to really keep a plant in, and the sensors meant to monitor the moisture level were not very helpful. “It’s not like you need this to know the status of your plant,” he added.

The smart planter comes with several potential input methods, including a touch screen on the front, some strips on the side meant to act as touch controls, and at least one button on the rear. Christophel had not yet connected these inputs, so at present, there is no means of actually controlling the game.

The video did not go into extensive detail about how Christophel hacked the device to play Doom, nor did he specify any future plans for the Doom plant pot. It still shows that pretty much anything with a screen can play Doom.