Meet Cloudagotchi : Building a virtual pet with a cloud brain (Part 1)

Remember Tamagotchis? Those little egg-shaped keychains from the 90s with a pixelated pet that got hungry, got sad, and, if you were a negligent eight-year-old like me, got dead during math class. I've been looking for an excuse to play with the Waveshare ESP32-S3 Touch AMOLED 1.8" , a $30 board with a gorgeous 368×448 AMOLED touchscreen, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a speaker. And I found one: I'm building a Tamagotchi. But with a twist that makes it worth a four-article series The pet's body lives on the device. Its brain lives in AWS. The device renders an adorable pet and captures your taps and shakes. But its hunger, mood, and energy are rows in DynamoDB. It gets hungry overnight because EventBridge Scheduler says so. And, my favorite part (and because it's 2026, we can't not have genAI in a project 🤪), every morning it fetches the AWS news, has Amazon Bedrock rewrite them in its own squeaky personality, and reads them to me out loud through Amazon Polly. A Tamagotchi with a job. In this series, I will walk you through the whole build: This article : the architecture, and connecting the ESP32-S3 to AWS IoT Core (the pet's nervous system). Part 2 : giving it a face: animations and touch with LVGL on the AMOLED. Part 3 : the serverless brain: Lambda, DynamoDB, and a pet that gets hungry while you sleep. Part 4 : Bedrock + Polly: my Tamagotchi reads me the AWS news. ⚠️ Reality check before you get too excited (sorry 😅): this is a hobby project, not a product. You'll need the specific Waveshare board (or the patience to adapt the code to yours), an AWS account, and a USB-C cable. The AWS bill for the whole series is well under a dollar a month, but it is not zero, and neither is the time you'll spend staring at idf.py monitor . Worth it, though. All the code lives in this repository . Each article has its own branch. For this one, git checkout article-1 . Why put a pet's brain in the cloud? Fair question. The original Tamagotchi ran on a chip with less power