u/KatastrophalKlang

Hi fellow Makers!

I wanted to share a project that has been our favorite weekend activity lately. My 10-year-old son Justus and I built Pixel-Pets—a world-aware virtual pet ecosystem.

https://preview.redd.it/5y926df73yyg1.jpg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=48bcde485f688432510d42226dcce8e2953b6919

The Setup:

• Justus (10): Acted as the Product Owner and Chief Designer. He designed the mood logic and the pet interactions.
• Me: I acted as the "technical wingman," helping with hardware quirks and bridging the gap between his ideas and the implementation.
• The Tech: We used the M5Stack ecosystem (CoreS3, Core2, and StickC PLUS2).

The "AI Twist": As a CIO, I wanted to see if I could empower my son to actually "build" the firmware without years of coding experience. We used Claude (AI) as our lead developer. My son provided the logic and sketches, and the AI wrote 100% of the C++ code under our direction.

Cool Features:

• Inter-device communication: We used ESP-NOW so a handheld "Pip" remote can "throw" treats to the main pet on a different device.
• World-Awareness: The pets pull real-time weather and moon phases based on IP geolocation.
• Open Source: It’s 100% open source because we want to inspire other families to build together.

The Sunday Tradition: Justus has a ritual of checking his GitHub stars every Sunday evening before bed. He’s currently watching the count closely—if you like what we’ve built, a star would truly make his weekend!

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/marceld23/Pixel-Pets

I'd love to hear about your experiences building tech projects with your kids or using AI to lower the entry barrier for making!

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project my 10-year-old son Justus and I have been working on: Pixel-Pets.

It’s a world-aware virtual pet system built on the M5Stack (ESP32) platform.

https://reddit.com/link/1t2p3si/video/sml3b7vp1yyg1/player

The Tech Stack:

• Main Devices: Runs on CoreS3 ("Muffin"), Core2 ("Goo-Goo"), and StickC PLUS2 ("Pip").
• Inter-connectivity: We used ESP-NOW so the "Pip" handheld can "throw" treats to the main pet on another device.
• World-Awareness: The pets sync real-time weather and moon phases via IP geolocation.
• Development: As a CIO, I wanted to see if I could empower my son to "code" his own toy. We used AI (Claude) as a translator -my son provided the designs and logic, and the AI wrote 100% of the firmware under our direction.

Why we did it: It’s a bridge between the 90s Tamagotchi nostalgia and modern IoT hardware. It’s 100% Open Source because we hope other parents might use it to get their kids into STEM/Hardware.

My son Justus actually checks the GitHub stars every Sunday evening- if you like the project, a star would make his day!

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/marceld23/Pixel-Pets

Happy to answer any technical questions about the ESP-NOW implementation or the AI-assisted workflow!

I built Pixel Pets, an open-source virtual pet family for M5Stack hardware.

https://preview.redd.it/ryo0gqturyyg1.jpg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=465c615b68b64a144d9853a89252b546cddd389f

It started as a father-and-son maker project and turned into a small family of pets:

- Muffin: CoreS3 + Module-LLM, with offline voice interaction

- Visu: CoreS3 without the LLM module

- Goo-Goo: Core2 version

- Pip: StickC PLUS2 companion that can send treats/gestures via ESP-NOW

The pets have moods, needs, mini-games, sounds, touch/button/IMU reactions, weather/moon awareness and ESP-NOW friendships.

The idea was to make something playful for kids, but still inspectable and hackable for adults.

No cloud account, no tracking, no subscription.

GitHub:

https://github.com/marceld23/Pixel-Pets

Project page:

https://marceld23.github.io/Pixel-Pets/

I’d love feedback from other M5Stack users. Especially curious what hardware variant people would actually build first.

Which variant would you build first: Core2, CoreS3 or StickC companion?