Let’s face it, we all need a little distraction sometimes, especially lately. And for our money, there’s no better way to put your brain in park than to start up a Minecraft world and get to digging. The simple graphics, the open world, and the lack of agenda other than to find resources and build things are all very soothing.
But play the game long enough and you’re bound to think about what it would be like if the game world crossed over into the real world. The ironically named [Michael Pick] did just that when he managed to craft a real Minecraft furnace that can actually power the game. Of course, there are some liberties taken with the in-game crafting recipe for a furnace, which is understandable for a game that allows you to punch trees with a bare fist to cut them down.
Rather than using eight blocks of cobblestone to build his furnace, [Michael] made a wooden shell for a commercial folding camp stove. Insulated from the shell by a little cement board, the furnace looks pretty true to the in-game item. To generate the electricity needed to run the game, he used a pair of thermoelectric camping generators. With the stove filled with wood — presumably un-punched — the generators put out enough juice to at least partially charge a battery bank, which was then used to power a Raspberry Pi and 7″ monitor. His goal was to get enough power from the furnace to do a speed run in the game and find three diamonds to build a diamond pickaxe. Honestly, we’re jealous — our first diamonds never come that easy.
We’ve seen other Minecraft-IRL crossovers before. Fancy a ride in a minecart? We’ve got that covered. Or maybe you’d rather control a desk lamp from within the game? That’s a thing, too.
Would be neat to do a version of this that works more closely like the in-game one, with a top and bottom compartment for the fire and the food and a grill in between.
Intrigued by those “camping generators”. At first glance they look pretty cool.
5 watt output requires the bottom surface to be heated to 350 C (!)
And they caution not to use any flame or heat source that can reach the silicone part.
10 cm diameter bottom at 350C is going to need around 1 kW. At full power, it will boil off the entire contents in about 10 minutes.
So you need to have a proper stove with a 10 cm hole in the top to mate with this.
And you need to feed it fuel to maintain the correct power (heat) input, 25 grams per minute of dry wood. 1.5 kg/hr.
And you need to feed it 50 grams per minute of water. 3 liters per hour.
Are you willing to spend an hour or so feeding this thing to provide a lousy 5 watt-hours of energy?
Sure, both fuel and water can be had many places for just the cost of your time and labor to gather them, but babysitting this thing to charge my phone is the last thing I’d want to be doing while camping.
If you desperately need to have that amount of electric energy, just carry a few extra batteries, fer pete’s sake. This generator is 350 grams. That’s 14 18650 cells, 140 watt-hours of energy, 28 hours of labor running this generator.
Now you have me curious as to how much MORE you could get out of a similar steam turbine (size and weight).
Also, a solar 10 w panel is probably cheaper and easier to use.