This Nanny Bot Keeps Tamagotchi Pets Alive Forever

If you weren’t alive for it, you might not realize how intense Tamagotchi fever got in the late ‘90s. As a certified ‘90s Kid, I can assure you that it was out of control. Everyone I knew in my elementary school had at least one Tamagotchi and some of the cool kids had several of them. But I don’t recall seeing many adult Tamagotchi pets, because children have short attention spans. In order to finally provide Tamagotchi pets with indefinite quality care, Jens built this nanny bot for the little digital critters.

This is a kind of robot that can work with any Tamagotchi in the original egg style, without requiring any modification of the device. It will responsibly watch the Tamagotchi pet from the time it hatches and throughout its entire life, feeding it and cleaning up after it as necessary. Without any human intervention, it will provide perfect care.

The biggest challenge here was avoiding the need to modify the Tamagotchi — a route that Jens could have taken to make his life easier. To make that happen, Jens needed a way to interact with the Tamagotchi and a way to see its status.

Interaction was straightforward. Jens designed a 3D-printable cradle for the Tamagotchi to rest in, with three servo motors to press the three buttons. But reading the screen was trickier. Jens connected a camera to a Raspberry Pi and pointed that at the Tamagotchi screen. He then used a computer vision script to detect the sprites.

That wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because even small variations in lighting can throw off the detection. The nature of the cheap ‘90s LCD didn’t help matters. But the silver lining was that there are only a handful of possible sprites and they’re all pretty simple. That let the computer vision detect sprites with enough reliability for this application.

From there, it was a matter of programming a care routine. That took a lot of work, but Jens ended up with a robot that can follow a handful of rules to raise a Tamagotchi pet to adulthood. If it detects poop, it presses the sequence of buttons necessary to clean that up. It can look at the metrics for health and happiness, and act accordingly.

This also let Jens test a serious ‘90s urban legend: that feeding a Tamagotchi too much will kill it. Jens programmed a function to try that and found that the legend is ...false. At least on this version — it is possible that other Tamagotchi versions did include that risk.