Anand D
Author
Maker and Youtuber, Brenpoly recently built an offline AI virtual pet that lives on an ESP32 and “gets sick” when you doomscroll too much, turning screen-time guilt into a tangible, hardware-based consequence. The project makes use of the 1.8 inch touch screen display and sensors that come integrated with the Waveshare ESP32-S3 based module to create a companion that reacts to your phone usage, encouraging healthier digital habits through a mix of gamification and gentle punishment.
The brain of the system is an Android phone running quantized large language models (LLMs), Whisper for speech-to-text, and Piper for text-to-speech, all locally with no cloud dependency. The phone monitors app usage and screen time, then communicates with the ESP32 over a serial or BLE link; if you exceed set limits on social or short-form video apps, the ESP32 updates the pet’s state to “sick,” changes its animations, and can even speak warnings through the phone’s TTS engine.
By keeping the AI stack entirely on-device, the build preserves privacy while showcasing how modern mobile hardware can run useful LLMs and speech models alongside a custom embedded peripheral. The result is a compelling demo for makers and embedded engineers: a tangible, AI-augmented device that blends ESP32 firmware, Android app development, and local LLM inference into a single, attention-aware virtual pet that literally suffers when you can’t stop scrolling.
