A. Forsberg Brings a Little WOPR Into the Server Room with This WarGames-Inspired 1U Light Panel

Maker A. Forsberg would like to help fans of 1983 hack-thriller classic WarGames play a little game in the server room — using a Raspberry Pi Pico-powered 3D-printed 1U light panel inspired by Joshua and WOPR.

"I’ve always been deeply fascinated with the aesthetic of WOPR, the computer from WarGames (1983)," Forsberg explains. "The steadily changing lights that allegedly represented the state of the machine are something I've wanted to replicate in my server rack for years. Recently I decided that if the product didn’t exist, I'd make it."

WarGames sees Matthew Broderick as David Lightman war-dialling random computers before stumbling across an interactive machine that introduces itself as Joshua. Joshua would like to play a nice game of chess, but Lightman sees something else on the menu: global thermonuclear war. The problem: Joshua is now WOPR, the War Operation Plan Response machine trusted by NORAD to alert to and protect against nuclear attack — and its operators don't know it's a game.

The WOPR was never a real computer, but a prop designed by Geoffrey Kirkland and inspired by military cabinets of the 1940s and 1950s combined with tabulating machines. Its biggest nod to modern technology: an array of lights across its front panel, which would inspired supercomputer manufacturer Thinking Machines Corporation in its design of the real-world Connection Machine CM-1 and later successors.

Forsberg's version is a standalone device, which takes 12 8×8 LED matrices and slots them into a 3D-printed bracket for installation in a 1U slot of a server cabinet. Like the WOPR prop, the lights don't actually mean anything — but they animate nicely thanks to a Raspberry Pi Pico and some MicroPython code.

"When running, it will flip a coin per column (96 of them) to decide if that column will change at all from its previous state," Forsberg explains. "If it will be changed, it flips eight coins to decide what that column will look like. It then draws the image to the display. Afterwards, it flips a four-sided coin to decide how long it will wait before moving on and repeating the loop."

The project is documented in full, including source code, on Printables, where the 3D models can be downloaded under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.