Your most commonly visible bones are your teeth, so what better way to worship at the fleshy altar of Doom than by polishing those bones with an electric toothbrush whose little LCD screen is running Id Software’s seminal satanic shooter? The latest delightfully weird device rising to the eternal question “Can it run Doom?” is a WiFi-enabled ‘smart toothbrush’, which is juuust powerful enough to run a version of Doom. You can even control it with your mouse. Here, check this out.
Aaron Christophel, whose Twitter bio declares “my biggest passion is to run a custom firmware on as many devices as possible” (and also offers the rallying cry of “Hack the planet!”), has been poking at a Planck Mini toothbrush. The smartbrush has a screen offering information from “brushing performance” to weather reports, powered by a chip which turns out to be up to running Doom. And the Mini is the children’s model, so that’s nice for the wee kiddywinkles. Christophel demonstrated on Tuesday:
He went on to explain that “the toothbrush contains an ESP32-C3 with 4MB Flash” so “with the codebase from Spritetm and miniwad I was able to get the complete size of Doom and WAD file down to the 4MB of the ESP32🥳”. Miniwad is an extremely simplified asset pack to fit Doom into as little space as possible, which is why weapons and enemies look weird on the toothbrush. I mean, it also looks weird because it is Doom running on a toothbrush. Christophel later demonstrated it in fullscreen too:
Oh, and that codebase Christophel mentioned using? That’s to make Doom run on a tiny 3D-printed Christmas tree decoration, either showing the demo mode or yes, actually playable if you connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I had not seen this before and am delighted:
Doom Christmas Bauble – teaser
If you actually, genuinely want to run Doom on this toothbrush yourself, it’ll take a fair bit of work. I assume you’re up for that, seeing as you’re intending to run Doom on a toothbrush. Christophel has released code to install custom firmware on the brush, as well as a video showing off more of that.
Remember to play Doom for three minutes morning and evening to ensure a happy, health mouth. People close to you—and the satans in your toothbrush—would also be grateful if you played Doom on your tongue.
In other weird Doom device news, robomower company Husqvarna last week announced they’re officially bringing Doom to some of their lawnmowers.
