There’s something fascinating about old tech—those tiny devices that somehow felt alive even with only a few pixels and a beeping speaker.
Last year I tried recreating that feeling by building my own virtual pet. The result was fun, but not enough. It needed more personality… more purpose… more chaos.
So I rebuilt it from scratch.
TamaFi V2 isn’t just another Tamagotchi clone.
It’s a standalone cyber-creature living inside a custom PCB, powered by ESP32-S3, scanning WiFi networks around it, reacting to the environment, evolving based on how you treat it, and occasionally doing things you probably shouldn’t ask too many questions about.
Let’s break it down.

📦 Hardware — Smaller, Cleaner, Meaner
For this version, I wanted TamaFi to look like a real product, not a development board with a screen glued on top.
Changes from V1 → V2
- Half the size of the original board
- A custom-shaped PCB designed for symmetry
- Non-modular ST7789 TFT for a clean, integrated look
- MOSFET brightness control for smooth backlight levels
- 6 soft tactile switches — clean, responsive, and satisfying
- WS2812B-2020 Neopixels for subtle mood and status lighting
- TP4056 charging module, because yes — it’s pocket-friendly
- Optional CP2102 USB-TTL, although the S3 has native USB anyway
During assembly I managed to slightly burn the display with the hot-air gun… but thankfully it survived. Cifer-luck.

📡 Software — Smarter, Reactive, Alive
TamaFi isn’t scripted. It thinks, makes choices, and reacts to the wireless environment around it.
Core Features
- WiFi-based feeding system
Your pet “hunts” for networks. More networks = fuller and happier pet. - Mood engine
Hunger, happiness, health, network density — all influence behavior. - Autonomous actions
If you ignore TamaFi, it makes decisions on its own. - Evolution system
It grows from Baby → Teen → Adult → Elder based on stats and time. - Rest cycles
Smooth animations, recovery bonuses, and personality changes.
🧪 “Unusual” Abilities (for… science)
TamaFi V2 contains a few experimental features inspired by cybersecurity labs.
Included:
- Aggressive mode → When your pet gets angry, it sends Deauth bursts to nearby networks, causing brief disruptions.
- Broadcast mode → TamaFi creates WiFi access points with messages based on its mood.
- Network curiosity → Hidden SSIDs, open networks, and strong RSSI affect happiness and stats.
Everything is purely educational, of course.

🛠 Tools Born During Development
While working on V2, I ended up creating a helper tool:
🔧 DisplayKit
A web-based UI-builder for TFT & OLED displays.
No installation, no setup — just open in your browser and start designing.
Available on my GitHub.
This saved hours of layout work.

📑 Menu System
TamaFi’s UI is simple but packed:
- Pet Status → Age, mood, stage, stats
- Environment → WiFi landscape
- System Info → Device health, runtime
- Controls → Brightness, sound, LEDs
- Settings → Reset, autosave, behaviors
- Diagnostics → Development testing modes
And yes: you can navigate faster using the side buttons.
🧬 What’s Next?
I’m nowhere near finished.
Next upgrades:
- AI personality so you can actually talk to your pet
- More wireless-aware behaviors
- More chaotic modes
- A webapp interface
- Expansion modules
- And a few things I’ll keep secret for now
TamaFi V2 is just warming up.

🧡 Sponsored by NextPCB
Big thanks to NextPCB for supporting this project!
If you're building your own TamaFi or any other PCB project, I highly recommend NextPCB for fast, reliable, and affordable PCB manufacturing and assembly.
🛠️ Get your boards made here → https://www.nextpcb.com
💻 Code & PCB
If you’re interested in building this project, the code and schematic are available on GitHub. Simply visit the GitHub repository to download the necessary files. Feel free to test the code and share your feedback or improvements.
GitHub repository...
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CiferTech
Taiwo
I would like to suggest either a joint project or your ideas on something that's about that size and it may or could be either a pendant or put in a small case or perhaps even a very large watch. But a display a speaker a microphone a small camera and an enormous amount of memory and a pretty heavy processor and maybe add on tensor Coral type neural processing unit for loading a very good open source large language model that allows the user to customize the voice mood all the different personality aspects to create your own virtual assistant. It could send maps and so forth to your phone and could be outfitted with a small GPS if you've seen the GPS module in some of the seed products they're quite small and even have a PPS setting or pin.
Basically a large language model that you can either have self-stored on the device with limited functionality and the ability to use Wi-Fi etc and or load in a certificate access to your own home lab cloud or your own home base version running on a much more powerful PC.
It would be like having a store password /hardware access device to make it through into your home lab.
For me large language models and neural networks have been mostly helpful and increasing my organization and adding to my productivity through automated research and fleshing out different ideas and projects. I'm also a lawyer and I teach a specialty class open to lawyers and graduate level engineers and it professionals that addresses a lot of startup issues where I've seen people fail not due to the thing that they're making or the service they're offering but because they failed to prioritize law regulation or policy in some way and I had one person even tell me that they didn't need legal advice they needed more engineers and that person has created a national problem here in my country out of his pure lack of his ignorance basically and his ego.
He's now putting privacy at risk here in my country because he would not listen to a lawyer and thought because he was a bench scientist that he could figure out law on his own or he had some pretty poor legal advice as I've been a private International lawyer for 20 years. I also had a commodore 64 and a BBS before the modern internet and have watched it involve over the entire last 35 plus years or more as I had one as a teenager with my own phone line after my parents got fed up hearing a modem screaming at them.
I'm a lawyer who is friendly to startups and to engineers it professionals cyber security researchers and have even given some advice on proper cybersecurity and reverse engineering methodology and paper trail keeping as well as disclosure methodology decided up front and added security to guard against accidental disclosure before you've made a proper disclosure. I used the Tetra team as a very good example and added a few additional ideas and I think they're wise ones but I also urged law enforcement and the entities responsible for setting the standards to be more open to listening to ethical cyber Security professionals and that law enforcement should also be more respectful and you their proper investigation to not accidentally jail ethical cyber security researcher as many of the zero days and potentially extremely dangerous holes in security throughout the internet have been discovered by University researchers, independent cyber security researchers, and people who are just interested in seeing how things work and come across massive security problems.
One guy was arrested at the airport just because his IP address came up in the wrong location and the federal authorities failed to even look him up on LinkedIn and it was clear that he was working for the company that had been tasked to investigate this particular issue and he spent a couple nights in jail without any reason and it showed a huge lack of respect and lack of communication and proper collaboration between our community and law enforcement.
At the same time you have to be careful of people who are claiming to be ethical cyber security researchers and are using that as a cover for doing malicious activities and it may be a small part of the community but as a community we kind of should self police. I know nobody wants to be a rat but those individuals cast all of us in a very negative light and have given hacker a negative connotation when we all know historically that it's just people who are curious about how things work. Hackers have probably saved more money and losses and data disclosures based on security failures and security by obscurity and have brought those three main problems that are consistently problems such as improper setup or the failure to flash devices in a timely manner or a failure of the companies to create firmware that patches those particular security issues and that's all one issue and the second is security by obscurity and everybody knows the final poor passwords.
You're home assistant it'll also serve as a Hardware security device by storing your credentials and those credentials should become certificate based and be renewed every two years at a minimum and now I should be running Quantum resistant encryption libraries and you could even throw a decent thumbprint and or facial scanning ability on the device I'm suggesting so it not only does it serve as a standalone LLM, or a much more capable llm that functions through 4G LTE or Wi-Fi at your discretion throw in the SIM f you want restore your Wi-Fi credentials.
And create the correct secure access to your home network from the exterior with a certificate base combination layered security method if you want to use a much more capable model running on your home network.
The second and third the things that I would dream of are a pair of glasses that I ran across in my brain first but then they showed up in a science fiction series (the culture series) which is a pair of glasses that is not necessarily a VR pair of glasses but one which expands the Spectrum that you can observe the world in and I wonder how that will affect how our brains process and see the world and perhaps even how we think and could potentially open up new avenues of research if we can see in different spectrums of the infrared, UV, false color radio waves of different spectrums and different frequencies, using a flexible array of antennas and time of flight and angle of arrival built into the frame you could actually make pretty good estimates of the amount of non-ionizing electronic communication hot spots and visualize those in color or in different ways on your screens as well as expand the spectrum of visible light whether it be through false color or any other type of visualization method but just the ability to open up that EM spectrum for us to analyze just with a normal pair of glasses albeit maybe at the moment a bit bigger framed but maybe some of that can be packed into through a wire into a processor in your pocket or some other way of powering and processing what the various sensors are picking up and even the sensors could be potentially located on other parts of your body and the glasses are merely showing you it can be split up and mixed up depending on the size and it could even be modular so that you don't have to be completely kitted out.
You can even use a small thermal bluetooth printer for the above large language model on your watch or on a pendant to print out the results of a search or answers to certain questions which would make it quite helpful and useful there's just a lot of different potential use cases for having a very portable llm and I know that I have one on my phone right now and it's called The Gemini and it's not bad at all and I don't pay much extra for it in addition to the normal additional cloud storage so maybe even piggybacking but I like the idea of Open Source and the privacy that it provides as well as the ability to set the parameters and it's abilities and to not have any necessary not safe for work guard rails.
I think that I can censor out my own information and I would rather curate my information based on my ethics and my moral belief system as opposed to having it thrust on me by company.
I'm not saying that Gemini is not a pretty good tool and I would say never fire anyone for the purpose of having an llm or a neural network but just use it to increase your employees productivity and it should never replace a human because a human can create and imagine in a way that we cannot replicate and probably aren't close to even getting there as it's a product of millions of years of evolution and if you believe sir Roger primrose quite complex quantum entanglement that takes place in the microtubules and we have very little understanding of just how profound are mind actually is or could very likely be.
Thank you for this because it reminds me of what I can do or what any of us can do if we really set our mind to it and do the work to make it happen and thank you for your tool that seems like it'll be really helpful for people who are setting up these type of UIs.
I'm not so great at the PCB work as I don't have a degree in electrical engineering but I am good with ideas and creativity as well as assisting engineers and it professionals at getting their products into the market and not making the many mistakes I've seen them make inadvertently because I can tell you one thing law policy and regulation have no relation to the scientific method or even that type of thinking.
I remember while I was studying philosophy one of the most incredible engineering and mathematic minds that I've met couldn't write the first paragraph of an ethics paper so we traded and he helped me build a relational database and I helped him to write his ethics paper but I did it and we did it ethically meaning he could write one afterwards and I could write my own relational database once I understood it and we made sure that each other learned what was necessary the learning that was meant to take place so we didn't just do the work for each other.
He went on to have I believe a quite successful and probably very wealthy career as he joined Microsoft pretty early and I think he did very well with his career I haven't spoken with him since University his name is Jim.