Zelda Fan Controls His Smart Home With An Ocarina

Like many of elements of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Link's latest adventure breaks a long-running franchise tradition by not giving its elven-eared hero any musical instruments to play. That's going to be a problem for some fans, but not Allen Pan, who runs the YouTube channel Sufficiently Advanced. In a video uploaded over the weekend, Pan showed off his hand-built smart home set-up, which he controls by playing songs from The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on a real-life ocarina.

At the center of the system is a microphone attached to a Raspberry Pi, which listens for and recognizes various ocarina notes. When Pan plays a specific song, the Raspberry Pi activates one of the WiFi-connected devices scattered around Pan's house.

Naturally, each device is attached to a thematically appropriate song from Ocarina of Time. For example, the Bolero of Fire, which teleports Link to the Fire Temple's entrance, cranks up Pan's heat. The Sun's Song, which switches the time in Hyrule from night to day (and vice versa), turns Pan's lights on and off. The Song of Storms starts the humidifier, the Minuet of Forest waters the plants, and the Song of Time activates an electronic clock that announces the time and current temperature.

The Zelda-inspired smart home isn't the only geeky DIY project that Pan has put together, of course. Other videos on Sufficiently Advanced include a "real" version of Thor's hammer Mjolnir, which reads users' fingerprints and can only be picked up by someone it deems worthy (i.e. Pan himself), a mind-control helmet inspired by the X-Men's Cerebro, and a lightsaber the spouts colored flames.