wtf is esp32-tamagotchi?

This project shows you how to build your own physical Tamagotchi style pet using an ESP32-C3 microcontroller board, a small ST7789 screen, and the Arduino IDE. You feed it, play with it, clean it, and let it sleep, and if you neglect its stats too long the pet dies, though you can just restart and try again. The hardware is simple and hand buildable: a homemade ESP32-C3 board, a 1.69 inch display, three tactile buttons wired without needing extra resistors, and a small buzzer for sound. The author also mentions that swapping in a smaller ST7735 screen can free up memory if you want more animation frames. The code is organized into separate files for the character logic, button input, display drawing, hardware setup, and sprite images, so someone new to the project can find the piece they want to change without reading everything at once. You can adjust how fast the character moves, how animations tick, and how the mini games behave, all from within the code. To use your own pet artwork, you draw or generate 90x90 pixel images, convert them into a hex array using an online image to hex converter, and paste that array into the sprites file. To compile the project without errors, the author recommends specific versions of the Arduino IDE and the ESP32 boards manager, and building it also requires installing a companion display library the same author published separately for the ST7789 screen. The project is released under the GPL-3 license, so you are free to copy, modify, and share your own version of the device and its code. The README also links to a video tutorial that walks through the whole build step by step, along with a handful of separate mobile games by the same author that are not part of this repository.