Planet Arduino

If you miss your Tamagotchi virtual pet from the ’90s, Element14 Presents’ DJ has come up with the next best thing — or perhaps something even better!

His DIY device named “Tomo,” for friend, displays a digital companion on its 1.3” OLED screen, and features a variety of mini games that lets you level it up with new characteristics.

The game/pet, which runs on a MKR Zero, implements three buttons for control, a power switch, and a piezo speaker for audio feedback (all the beeps and boops you’d expect). While still very much handheld, its blue and purple 3D-printed shell is significantly larger than the original Tamagotchi. This should make it easy to use, and its low part count means it wouldn’t be hard to duplicate either.

[Vadim] was feeling a bit bored at work one day and dreamed up this rather odd project. He had a spare LED matrix handy, and thought, “I should build a giant Tamagotchi…” and so he did.

In case you’re not aware, Tamagotchi’s were digital pets introduced in the late 90′s. You had to feed them, play with them and even train them — attempting to teach the responsibility of having a real pet. It was a bit of a fad, and to be honest, they were really quite annoying — but that didn’t stop [Vadim] wanting to make his own!

He’s using an ATmega328P with the Arduino boot loader at the heart of this project. The LED matrix is made of a group of four 8×8 LED modules with four shift registers (74HC595) and two Darlington transistor arrays to take the current — This is because the 256 LEDs need to be multiplexed down to 32 IO’s (16 rows + 16 columns).

Once the hardware was all done, he started coding — he’s actually coded the entire game from scratch, and while it’s not that complex it’s still an impressive amount of effort that went into this desktop sized Tamagotchi!

To see it in action, stick around after the break.

To learn more about hacking a Tamagotchi, there’s an excellent talk about how to reverse engineer it that we covered a few years ago.

Syst3mX @ instructables writes:

One day I was sitting behind my desk at work and I got that weird need to build something, after looking around for a bit I got my eye on an LED matrix and that sparked an idea in my head : “I WANNA MAKE A TAMAGOTCHI”.

So for those of you that don’t know what the heck is a Tamagotchi here is a little snip-it from wikipedia :
“The Tamagotchi (たまごっち Tamagocchi?) is a handheld digital pet, created in Japan by Akihiro Yokoi of WiZ and Aki Maita of Bandai. It was first sold by Bandai in 1996 in Japan.”

So my take on this classic toy is to make it in to a desktop gadget with an LED matrix for a display, and an Arduino for brains to make it more accessible to people. With that said join me as we design,build and program the World’s first (As far as I know) desktop Tamagotchi.

Make a Desktop Tamagotchi - [Link]