Robot Mario plays Super Mario

Twitter user Rick modified a Mario Lego action figure in a complete new kind of robotic device able to play the NES version of Super Mario Bros!

… It tooks About 4 hours. The complicated stuff was figuring out the bluetooth protocol. Then it‘s just simulating keypresses at certain events. On MacOS the NES emulators don’t work with simulated keys so the game is actually running in a Linux VM

It’s me! Robot Mario!

The robot controller ( running on something similar to an ESp32) works using an internal MCU Acellerometers, and by touching the figurine on a red/green tile. It has a camera sensor ( most likely just for color recognition) on the bottom. By putting “Robot Mario” into the pipe end  the game will do perform the same action!

The “hack” doesn’t require to modify the device hardware, but just to install the custom bluetooth software ( not released yet). Rick said he plans to share the code soon once is clean it up.

I wonder if someone is going to do a speedrun challenge with this? 🙂

Grab yours Lego Super Mario here :