Someone built a shiny finding machine

Someone much smarter than me has built a machine to find shiny pokemon.

The video above shows the handiwork of dekuNukem, who built what they call a 'hands free shiny finder.' The machine will go into a Pokémon encounter on its own via a microcontroller hooked up to the 3DS.

Here's where the machine gets particularly brilliant: it turns out that the easiest way to tell if you're in a shiny encounter is to look at the bottom screen. Shiny Pokémon have special animations appearantly, which means that at the start of the battle, it takes longer for the bottom screen to load. So what the machine does is, it uses a light sensor to measure how long the bottom screen is blacked out for in an encounter. If its blacked out for long enough, the machine will sound an alarm, and the user can come over and try to catch the Pokémon. If it's not a shiny encounter, it'll simply run away and then will find another encounter. Eventually, though, it'll find a shiny—it might take a while, but hey, the player doesn't actually have to be present for the boring parts.

How crazy is that?

-Eric Higgins