Category Archives: tamagotchi

Arduino Tamagotchi, first power up!

That was more intense and exciting than I anticipated! I thought building my first “homebrew Arduino”  from an atmega 328p and controlling an OLED via I2C shouldn’t be too complicated.

In fact, it isn’t, but there are a couple of things you have to think of, especially when you do it in this contrained space.

20161204_173740sAnd actually, you can see the wiring mistake I did up there, I connected the RST of the chip and the DTR of the FTDI port wrong. But chip, FTDI and capacitor survived it…

I also did the buttons wrong as the buttons were rotated and always ON / HIGH. So, I changed the layout from this:20161204_183737s

To this:20161211_212541So now the power is on the upper part of the buttons, instead of the right (for the left buttons).

Yeah, so finally, here’s the first power up! The date / time is wrong because the third perf board with the RTC and the speaker are not connected yet, so the clock starts when the atmega is powering up:

 

 

Arduino Tamagotchi – first board fitting (Pt 2a of 3)

The design principle of keeping everything to a minimum is also paramount in the Tamagotchi project. In this case, I wanted to use the Arduino chip itself and layout a board around it by myself and luckily, I also found out that my slaughtered external phone battery delivered 5.1 Volts which is in the operating range of the Arudino.

Tamagotchi PCBs

Tamagotchi PCBs

Top left, you see the front board with the display and the intended buttons (only one placed), top middle the board for the Arduino and it socket plus an USB port that will be used for the LiPo charger board (the one that is close to the battery) and on the right it’s the back plate containing the speaker and the RTC board. Continue reading

palmsize Tamagotchi

Recently, I’ve come across a really nice Tamagotchi project on Instructables.

Tamagotchies are virtual pets in little devices (later on also apps, etc) that the user has to feed, clean up after and play with. They are a nice addition in my thinking on social robotics. Also while still collecting knowledge for the 68k computer, I learned that I want to start with a stripped down Arduino, not a Nano I usually work with. So this is an ideal little weekend project to learn a few things. Continue reading