The Tamaguino was developed by Alojz Jakob and released for free under the GNU, General Public License. You can find all his original work here, Tamaguino.
We at DIY can remember fondly playing on our Tamagotchis, making sure they were well fed and well rested at all times, so when we saw this project, we knew we had to make one! For those that don’t know a Tamagotchi is a small pebble toy from the early 2000s. Your job was to feed it, clean it and play with it, these stats would slowly decrease over time and if they reached zero your pet would die and you would have to start again! The longer you kept your pet alive the more it would grow and age and that’s where the competition came in, because you know you had to have a Tamagotchi that was older and fatter than your friend’s, or you were a loser.
Alojz Jakob, clearly missed the good old days and decided to make the world a better place with his own version of the Tamagotchi, THE TAMAGUINO! The Tamaguino comes in two forms, The original which uses an Arduino Uno and a small OLED display or the miniaturized version, which uses an Arduino Pro Mini, OLED display and a small battery. The Tamaguino using an Arduino Uno is a nice easy project for beginners, but we at DIY are extra, so we HAD to go for the miniature version.
For this we used:
White OLED display module
Arduino Pro Mini V2
Tactile button (4.3mm) x3
1A Lithium battery charger module
Resistor 10K x3
Piezo buzzer
Small Lipo battery
40 x 60 mm PCB prototyping board
We also 3D printed the case provided by Alojzjakob for our miniature Tamaguino.
The Tamaguino is the perfect beginner’s project to challenge yourself and be rewarded in the end, unlike many beginner projects, you’ll be entertained with the results for days to come.
The difficult part in assembling the Tamagotchi is the planning of your layout, but luckily we have made a handy guide on our Wiki, that you can use to help you build your own Tamaguino!
What makes the Tamaguino even more amazing is the ability to edit the code to your liking. The Tamaguino original code comes with the ability to feed your dinosaur as well as play with it, discipline it and clean it. The Tamaguino also has a built-in mini-game to increase your dinosaur’s happiness. We added a save function to our code to save the stats of our Tamaguino on the EEPROM so as not to lose progress when it is shut down and you too can add your own code in to create a more advanced Tamaguino.
The Tamaguino is your star procrastinator toy and you know you need one.
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