Gautier Hattenberger found an old Game Boy at his parents’ house, so he did what anyone would naturally do after taking the time to be properly nostalgic about Mario: he decided to use the video game system to control a drone.
Hattenberger is part of the Paparazzi Project, which is developing an open-source autopilot system for drones, but the Game Boy project was just for fun. He detailed the hack on his blog and released the code on GitHub so that other people could do it too.
In brief, connecting the drone to the Game Boy required an Arduino and a FTDI chip, since the custom Game Link port was not going to play nice with a wireless drone all by itself. The Game Link information is translated onto a USB, which can hook up to a laptop. The wireless signals can then be beamed to the drone – in Hattenberger’s case, an ARDrone2.
