ESP8266 Tamagotchi DIY Kit

What is it

ESP8266 Tamagotchi is an electronic pet from the 90s. It can eat, shit, sleep, and everything else that comme il faut pet should do.

The key component of the board is a Wemos ESP8266 mini-board, that is connected to an SSD1306 OLED screen with 128 by 64 pixels resolution (which is plenty, considering 32 by 16 resolution of the original). You can power it from two AAA batteries and take it with you.

I designed it to assemble it together with my 6-year-old son. End result is nostalgia-filled handheld toy.

Main features

- Wemos D1 Mini MCU board

- SSD1306 I2C OLED screen

- 3 push-buttons

- M2 harness that keeps it in one piece

- Dual AAA Battery holder

- Buzzer

How to use it

Soldering

The kit includes all the headers and connectors you need to make it work. However, you’d need to have a soldering iron and a small piece of soldering wire.

Soldering job will take 5 to 30 minutes depending on your skills.

Please check on the project page for details assembly instructions

Mechanical

You will need to assemble together 4 M2 brass standoffs with corresponding bolts. 

Kit will happily accept power from any mini-USB charger or power bank. The battery holder on the back side allows to power from two AAA batteries

Firmware

Kits ships with a sample Platformio project, so please follow the official Platformio installation guide first.

Code is based on ArduinoGotchi ATmega emulator, which was ported to ESP platform.

Open the included firmware source code and build the project using the Platformio: Build task. Flash firmware to target using the Platformio: Upload task. Platformio will handle all the framework and library dependencies automatically

Space Invaders

Additionally, the 'Space Invaders' clone was ported to the Kit. It is black and white and filled with sounds, just like the original. You may give it a try.

Open Source Documentation

Both software and hardware documentation can be found on the project’s Github. You can follow project progress at Hackaday