Remember Tamagotchis? Those little egg-shaped keychains with a pixelated pet that got hungry, got sad, and, if you were a negligent eight-year-old like me, got dead during math class.
I built one. Except mine has a 368×448 AMOLED screen, an accelerometer, a speaker… and its brain runs on AWS.
Meet Cloudagotchi:
What it does
- It gets hungry while the device is off : time passes in the cloud, not on the chip. EventBridge Scheduler decides when it’s dinner time.
- It remembers you ignored it yesterday : its feelings are a DynamoDB row. You can’t reset a guilt trip by rebooting.
- You feed it by tapping an avocado, pet it by tapping its face, play with it by shaking the board. Every interaction is an MQTT round trip through AWS IoT Core.
- It dozes off if you leave it alone, complete with a little zzz.
- And my favorite part: every morning at 7:03, it reads me the AWS news out loud : Amazon Bedrock rewrites the headlines in the pet’s cute voice, Amazon Polly gives it speech, and the little face moves its mouth while it talks. A Tamagotchi with a job.
How it works (the 30-second version)
The device is the body; AWS is the brain. The ESP32 renders sprites and captures your taps. But every feeling, every stat, every decision comes from the cloud:
The stack, at a glance: ESP-IDF + LVGL on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 Touch AMOLED 1.8″, talking mutual-TLS MQTT to AWS IoT Core, with Lambda, DynamoDB and EventBridge Scheduler as the serverless brain, and a Bedrock → Polly → S3 pipeline for the morning briefing. All infrastructure defined with CDK. Total running cost: well under a dollar a month.
💡 Not coincidentally, this is the exact architecture of every serious connected device you own. Your robot vacuum is a Tamagotchi with a motor. We’re just building the fun version.
The series
I’m turning the whole build into four articles, each with its own git branch so you can follow along commit by commit:
- This is article 0 ^^: It’s a teaser so you come back to see the rest of the project 🤫
- Meet Cloudagotchi: A virtual pet with a cloud brain : the architecture, and connecting the board to AWS IoT Core with mutual TLS (plus the IoT policy trick that makes a kidnapped pet a non-event).
- [Coming July 23rd] Giving it a face : sprite-based LVGL UI, blinking, dozing, shake detection… and the very honest story of how my first “elegant” procedural face became a corrupted mess on real hardware.
- [Coming July 27st] It gets hungry while You sleep : the serverless state machine: Lambda, DynamoDB, and the lazy-time-accounting trick that makes a pet age without a single always-on process.
- [Coming July 29st] My tamagotchi reads me the AWS News : Bedrock as a squeaky-voiced news anchor, Polly’s one-parameter trick that deleted an entire firmware subsystem, and the four embedded-streaming gotchas nobody warns you about.
Fair warning: this series contains real war stories. Panels that wedge themselves, buffers defeated by presigned URLs, a TCP window doing trans-Atlantic math against me. The failures were the best teachers, so they’re all in there.
Part 1 drops on Tuesday, July 20th. Follow me to catch it.
The code is open source: github.com/tagazok/cloudagotchi. And, if you build one, please show me your pet. 👻
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