Welcome

This is the build guide for Mr. Mini Tamagotchi — a desk pet you wire up, flash, and bring to life yourself.

Start with a bag of parts and end up with a little robot whose eyes blink, drift around the room, and react when you talk to it over USB.

No prior electronics experience needed. If you can push a jumper wire into a breadboard, you can finish this.

Hardware components you need

ESP32-C3 SuperMini — a wifi-capable microcontroller the size of a postage stamp
SSD1306 0.96" OLED — 128×64 monochrome, I²C, the screen the pet looks out of
Jumper wires
USB-C cable — for flashing and power

You bring:

A laptop with a USB-A or USB-C port (bring adapters if you need them).
A USB-C to USB-C or USB-A to USB-C cable — whichever matches your laptop. (A cable is in the kit too, but bring your own as backup; some are power-only and won't carry data.)
Optional: a powerbank — once flashed, the pet runs off any USB power source, so you can unplug from your laptop and take it around the room.

Start here

Don't read everything first — go get a win. Setup gets your toolchain installed and verifies you can flash the board. Then Wiring builds the pet on a breadboard and runs the real firmware.

→ Setup

Fork the repo, install arduino-cli, verify flashing works. Start here.

Once the toolchain is verified, keep going at your own pace:

Wiring

Move onto a breadboard and add sound (buzzer) and motion (IMU).

Firmware

The full toolchain: daily workflow, serial monitor, troubleshooting.

Serial protocol

Switch expressions, play sounds, and read state over USB.

Skills

Let an AI coding agent drive the pet for you.

Already comfortable?

Jump straight to Setup, then the pin map and the make flash workflow. The serial protocol is the source of truth for everything the pet can do.

The ESP32-C3 SuperMini has known USB-CDC quirks on first power-up. If make flash can't find the board, hold BOOT, tap RESET, release BOOT — this forces download mode. You only need it once.