We made our own WOPR for Pi Towers
Ah, the WOPR — or “War Operation Plan Response” for those who enjoy abbreviations that sound like a robot from the future, only less like a friend and more like an overzealous maths teacher.
The WOPR is the supercomputer from the 1983 movie WarGames. It doesn’t understand sarcasm, it can’t sense when it’s being pranked, and it certainly doesn’t know when it’s been told to “play a game” — much like our Maker in Residence, Toby, who built it to delight and entertain all visitors to the Pi Towers Maker Lab.
What’s inside?
- Raspberry Pi 4
- Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2
- 5V power supply
- 615 AdaFruit NeoPixels
- Bluetooth speaker
A script runs on boot, which twinkles the NeoPixels in the traditional 1980s supercomputer colours, yellow and red.
Another script can be run to play a short clip from the film WarGames on the Touch Display 2 screen, explaining the WOPR. At the press of a button on the Touch Display, our faux WOPR also parrots famous lines from the film, such as: “Shall we play a game?” and “How about a nice game of chess?”
For those who wish to linger a little longer in the Maker Lab, Toby devised a game in which clips from 1980s films and music videos flash (a little too fast, in my opinion) up on the screen, with your job being to enthusiastically shout out where each clip is from.
Authentic enclosure
The body of the WOPR is a combination of 3D-printed plastics and laser-cut MDF painted in industrial grey, with Cricut silver lettering on the side. Everything is glued together, and a lot of sanding was required to make it appear as though it’s a sleek, fancy contraption from the future.
39 comments
Mike
Wow. Can it be made to play noughts and crosses against itself?
Robert
probably
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long
Of course – just set number of players to 0…
Kevin McAleer
Excellent build Toby! I love the different techniques used to make it too!
Raspberry Pi Staff Toby Roberts
Awww, fanks Kev!
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
I am now obsessed with the Cricut machine after poo-pooing it as the least interesting thing in the Maker Lab.
Alanah R
As an artist and maker of things, I resisted being called a “crafter” for a long time but I also secretly wanted a Cricut. It’s got a lot of uses–even if it’s just T-shirts and decals — and it’s a neat little machine.
Christian
Frankly, I would prefer to read other news, I’ll give some examples, when you will release a Pi 500 with all the components on the PCB, when you will update the Zero series to USB-C and maybe with larger memory cuts and more modern SoCs, when you will have staff able to expand the Pi 5 from the bottom without ridiculous hats that hinder thermal dissipation, when you will refine the production process to increase efficiency and when Sony forces you to make the mini laptop. For those who play, you always have the Foundation website, which is already full of experiential nonsense. Thanks.
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
Have a LOVELY day, Christian.
Christian
Thanks for your understanding, I really appreciated the style of the answer, I feel obliged to offer you my apologies :)
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
We’re allllll friends again :-)
Matt Hawkins
To be fair other news sites are available.
crumble
wrong path bro.
We need a Pi5² with 16-32GB 64bit DDR5LP RAM, 10Git LAN, AI chiplet, PoE… and last but not least max 1A and 25$.
The only reason I don’t ask for an 800 GBit LAN is that I can’t afford such a switch to set up an LLM cluster ;)
Santa, I really need this. llama3.2:3b on a Pi5 with 8B is fast but stupid
Raspberry Pi Staff PhilE
But have you been nice? Are you sure?
Ali-B
This post is useless without video (of dem blinkenlights!)
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
We tried! It kept strobing so we gave up (and didn’t want to bother our excellent photographer any further after they spent so long getting that excellent hero image). Maybe I’ll put some phone video footage on our TikTok/Instagram.
Ali-B
Dawwww… Nevermind. I’ll just have to make my own 😂
I hope it at least makes the correct background thrumming while it’s not doing other sounds/vid events… 😁
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
No thrumming at present… Toby, we should fix the lack of thrum!
Raspberry Pi Staff Toby Roberts
I completely forgot about the thrumming! I shall have to fix that. 👍
rpiMike
Awesome. Must be some video experts on here that can give some strobing free pointers. Presumably frequency or stabilisation issues?! Would love to see a video.
Tyeth Gundry
Go with 4-wire DotStars/APA102 instead of NeoPixels next time, they have a much higher refresh rate and always look great in photographs/videos.!
Michael Horne
Can’t quite get the scale without a banana. What are the dimensions? :-)
Great job! :-)
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
it is the length of my adult-sized arm with fingers outstretched
Raspberry Pi Staff PhilE
It’s a 7″ display, so no banana required.
Raspberry Pi Staff Toby Roberts
Good point Phil!
Raspberry Pi Staff Toby Roberts
Thanks Mike. You’re right of course, I’ll dig out the calibrated plastic banana tomorrow!
Michael Horne
LOL ;-)
Seriously, though, really good.job. Looks “proper” :-) Proper 80s brutalist tech.
Andrew S
We replaced “banana for scale” with “Touch Display 2 for scale” ;-)
Bryguyver
Looks great! I’ve always wanted to make my own. Any plans on sharing the build plans/3D print files?
AndyD
As it is smaller than the original is it a WOPR jr?
crumble
How many modems are connected?
Peter Cannon
Make one that fits on my desk, and I’ll scream:
“Shut up and take my money!”
Jos Bouten
Hi, I like the WOPR you built! I myself created a display some time ago which mimics the WOPR lights and some of the patterns seen in the movie. The design and code is available on github. I used 2 of them in my modular synthesizer. You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L203UwEdGJY
Ralf
Too bad that this is not a full scale replica… :(
Seriously, that is near the top of the list to build when I finally get the money to by my own house and retire. Trying to reproduce the dimension of film one, with all those flashing lights and an Apple II workalike screen.
Though inside, I actually want to hide two half-height 19″ racks to house my servers, networking and data storage devices… ;-)
Zephod Beeblebrox
Now to make it sentient and to arm it with the world’s computer controlled weapons and let it control the robot dogs of war. Roll on Terminator bots!
Raspberry Pi Staff Helen Lynn
A trying Christmas with the in-laws? ;)
Dan3008
What a strange game! The only winning move is not to play! How about the nice game of chess?
Iftekhar Bhuiyan
Great idea!
Greg G
Very nice build Ashley!
Did you fine plans or dimensions of the original build or did you best guess?
Comments are closed