FUMI, a Tamagotchi-style AI desk companion

An open-source desk pet on an ESP32-S3 with an LVGL animated face, touch interaction, virtual pet stats and push-to-talk voice chat routed through a provider-agnostic backend.

Build sheet

Controller: ESP32-S3
UI: LVGL animated character
Backend: Node.js, any LLM provider
Firmware: Arduino IDE

Can I build this?Beginner · AI 4/5 · $30–50

Difficulty: Beginner
AI-buildability: 4/5
Time: A weekend
Cost: $30–50

Parts

ESP32-S3 Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C

Tools

Computer with Arduino IDE 2.3USB-C cableNode.js 20.6+

Starter prompt

Based on "FUMI, a Tamagotchi-style AI desk companion" on Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/fumi-a-tamagotchi-style-ai-desk-companion

Write Arduino firmware for an ESP32-S3 touch display running LVGL. Draw a simple animated pet face with expressions for normal, happy and sleepy. Track hunger, energy and happiness that decay over time and rise on touch. Send a JSON message to a backend URL over HTTPS when the user presses a button, and show the returned reply text on screen.

Estimates based on the original write-up. How AI-buildability is scored. Building with an AI assistant? Connect it to Afterware (free MCP server).

Story

FUMI is a desk companion built around an ESP32-S3 running LVGL. The firmware drives an animated character with expressions, responds to touch, and tracks virtual pet stats such as hunger, energy, happiness, bond and growth. It also includes a small game.

Voice works through push-to-talk. The device uploads a WAV recording to a backend, which runs speech-to-text and sends the transcript to a selected text model. The firmware never holds a model API key; the backend keeps the key and forwards requests.

The backend is provider-agnostic and is documented for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok, OpenRouter, Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs. The repo also includes a browser demo for testing the backend without the hardware.

Resources · 2

Repository Prototype demo video