A Digital Pet with a Bad Temper

If you think about it, it’s amazing that the Tamagotchi ever took off the way it did in the 1990s. Why would anyone want a virtual pet bugging them all day? As if we don’t have enough going on in our lives already that we have to buy a device that drives us nuts or guilts us until we press its buttons. By comparison, maybe pet rocks weren’t such a bad idea after all.

But for whatever reason, people still love Tamagotchi-like gadgets to this day. Among them, YouTuber CiferTech enjoys fiddling with them so much that he has already completed his second custom digital pet build. The most recent project, which he just described in a video, is very polished. But it also comes with a hidden feature that takes nagging to a whole new level.

As far as the hardware is concerned, CiferTech designed a custom PCB for this handheld device. It is populated with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller and a small 240x240 pixel TFT LCD display. A few RGB LEDs and soft, tactile buttons round out the user interface.

The virtual pet behaves like most other Tamagotchi creatures. It needs attention and food at the proper times to stay happy and healthy. But CiferTech’s little pet has a dark side. When it gets angry, it doesn’t just pester its owner with some beeps and animations. This one sends a random stream of Wi-Fi packets to DoS your local network for a few seconds at a time. How’s that for an attention grabber?

If you find that you just don’t have enough annoyances in your life, then you are in luck. CiferTech has made his work open source, so you can go grab the design files and firmware to attack your own Wi-Fi network when you are a bad virtual pet parent.