Being of an era to remember the first wave of Tamagotchi I always have a warm nostalgia for virtual pet projects. It’s great to see that the concept lives on and moves from platform to platform in the hardware hacking community. This DIY Tamagotchi kit is centred around an ESP8266 connected to a small OLED screen and a few momentary press buttons to give you the vital inputs to keep your virtual pet alive!

Using a Wemos Mini D1 at the heart of the project you’ll need to do a little soldering and some assembly of M2 standoffs to get the mechanical build completed. The kit ships with a sample PlatformIO project and you’ll need to download and install the PlatformIO IDE to then compile and build the software to flash to the board. The project is based on the “Arduino Gotchi” project, which originally used an Arduino Uno, but has been ported over to the ESP8266 environment.

Power is supplied via a micro USB socket and we’re confident this would run for a long time off a USB power bank, although we think it would be a simple and fun project to get this up and running using a single LiPo cell and a boost converter.

There’s more detail over on the Github repository for the project and you can also check in on the project at its Hackaday.io page.