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A small touchscreen can make homelab trouble hard to ignore: in Adam Davidson’s project, a virtual pet loses health when selected Proxmox workloads stop running, memory use gets high, or Home Assistant can no longer be reached. It is a playful status display layered on top of existing monitoring—not a replacement for Proxmox or Home Assistant dashboards, and not a system that fixes faults automatically.
Why turn homelab monitoring into a virtual pet?
Davidson runs a Mini PC with Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Calibre, Uptime Kuma and other services, alongside local language models. He says a memory-heavy container had previously caused other services to fail. He wanted a more engaging way to notice trouble than relying on dashboards he might not be looking at.
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Tamagotchi Original - Tama Collage | $19.99 | Buy on Amazon |
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Giga Pets Interactive Digital Pet Toy, Boys & Girls, Puppy, Ages 6+ | $18.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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Tamagotchi Paradise - Orange Tropics | $44.97 | Buy on Amazon |
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Tamagotchi Original - Neon Lights | $22.97 | Buy on Amazon |
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He already had a Cheap Yellow Display (CYD)—an ESP32 development board with a built-in color touchscreen—and had adapted it to show a Tamagotchi-like character as a sit/stand reminder. For this version, he repurposed that glanceable display to reflect the state of selected homelab services and system memory. [How-To Geek]
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The display does not independently inspect Proxmox. Instead, the project uses a chain of existing tools: Proxmox VE provides workload information to Home Assistant, Home Assistant exposes entities, and the ESPHome-powered CYD receives the relevant entity data through Home Assistant’s native API.
#1 Best Overall
- The Original digital pet you love with stylish shell design!
- Feed it, turn lights on/off, play with it, give it medicine, clean up after its used the bathroom, check it’s health and discipline your Tamagotchi character if it bothers you when its happy, fed and all cleaned up
- Includes a game which helps to keep your character happy
- Raise your Tamagotchi from egg, to child, to adult and how you take care of it will decide which of the 7 Adults you’ll get
- Comes with 1 Tamagotchi device on a chain to take with you everywhere. Battery (CR2032) included. For ages 8 and up
- Proxmox VE integration: Home Assistant’s integration monitors Proxmox nodes, virtual machines and containers. It uses local polling, and entities appear when the configured Proxmox environment has at least one node with a VM or container. The integration can expose control actions subject to permissions, but Davidson’s display is described as a status monitor, not a controller. [Home Assistant: Proxmox VE]
- Home Assistant entities: The project uses selected entity states to determine whether workloads expected to be running are still on, and to read system RAM usage. [How-To Geek]
- ESPHome and the CYD: ESPHome provides the firmware and configuration system for the microcontroller; its native API connects ESPHome devices to Home Assistant. [Home Assistant: ESPHome]
Home Assistant is also part of the monitoring path. Because it runs inside the Proxmox homelab, it can itself become unreachable; when that happens, the display loses access to the entities it relies on and reports the lost monitor connection.
What makes the pet lose health?
These are settings and behaviors Davidson reports for his own implementation, not recommended thresholds for every homelab:
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- The character starts at 100 health.
- Relevant Home Assistant entities are checked every 60 seconds.
- Two consecutive readings are required before a value is treated as a problem, reducing reactions to momentary changes.
- If a monitored VM or container is reported off when it is expected to be running, the display changes appearance, identifies the affected workload and reduces the pet’s health.
- System RAM above 85% also reduces health, with a message showing the current percentage.
- If Home Assistant becomes unreachable, health drops rapidly and the screen reports that the monitor connection was lost.
- Once a problem is fixed, the pet returns to full health; if it has died, a new one hatches. The display also keeps a death count.
The account does not specify how much health each event removes, how quickly the unreachable condition drains it, or whether the configuration is publicly available. Those details matter if someone wants to reproduce the exact behavior rather than the general idea. [How-To Geek]
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What the display is—and is not—good for
A quick prompt to investigate
The pet turns selected conditions into a glanceable cue. A message naming a VM or container gives Davidson a lead about where to look, while the RAM message surfaces a resource-pressure signal. The screen is a playful summary of selected states, not a complete account of host health or application behavior.
Rank #3
- ZOOM. Nurture with a spin! Zoom into Paradise! Turn the dial to take care of your Tama. Zoom from cell to space for traditional nurturing play - clean the poop, feed them delicious food and make them feel better! Play new mini games and nurturing activities and shop in the new LAB MODE.
- CHARACTERS. Raise more than 50,000 Tamas. Depending on the environment and the way you take care of your Tama, you can grow over 50 different characters in 12 species, with over 30 new Tamas. Plus, BREED play creates more Tamas by bringing parent's genes to the next generation.
- CONNECT. Connect with friend's device directly to see how your Tamas interact - is it a good match or a bad match? And, now, when you connect, you can play games with or against your friend! ** Please note that the connect mini-game is not available in "Tamagotchi Paradise - Pink Land / Blue Water / Purple Sky / Jade Forest.” **
- THREE FIELDS. Start in the Tropics field and unlock the Glacier and Forest fields for different play and Tamas. Plus, purchase are expansions to expand the field!
- AND MORE. The Orange Tropics device has a pretty pink shell with orange top, dial and buttons
Dashboards remain the diagnostic tools
When the display signals trouble, Davidson opens the Proxmox interface to investigate and fix it. The CYD does not replace the underlying dashboards, explain why a workload failed, or perform corrective actions. Its role is to make a change in monitored status more visible.
The monitor depends on the system it monitors
Home Assistant is a dependency, not an independent fallback. If it cannot be reached, the CYD cannot receive the entity data it normally watches. The project makes that failure visible as its own condition, but the display’s alerts still rely on the Home Assistant connection.
Rank #4
- The Original Tamagotchi digital pet you loved back in 1997 is back with the original programming! Feed it, turn lights on/off, play with it, give it medicine, flush after it’s used the bathroom, check it’s health and discipline your Tamagotchi if he bothers you when he’s happy, fed and all cleaned up
- Includes Character game where you have to guess which way the Tamagotchi will move next
- A purple shell with neon lights and 'Tamagotchi', dark pink frame, green buttons, and original programming and characters
- Raise your Tamagotchi from egg to child to Adult and how you take care of it will decide which of the 7 Adults you’ll get. Comes with 1 Tamagotchi on a chain to take with you everywhere
- Battery (CR2032) included. For Ages 8+
What readers can take from the project
Davidson reports that he noticed and fixed issues before they took down other services. That is his experience with this setup; no measured before-and-after reliability result is provided, so it should not be read as evidence that a virtual-pet display generally improves uptime. [How-To Geek]
The broader design is straightforward: reuse monitoring data you already collect, choose a small set of conditions that matter to you, and present them in a way you are likely to notice. The pet’s health condenses those conditions into one status signal, while its messages point toward the underlying dashboard for diagnosis.
Best Value
- Hello Kitty is helping to raise and nurture your Tamagotchi character! Raise your Tamagotchi character well and you might receive one of the surprise characters!
- Feed your Tamagotchi character Hello Kitty's favorites - apple pie or milk. Three fun mini games - Piano game, Balloon game, and Apple game
- Joey will make a mess of Tamagotchi character's space, so Hello Kitty needs to come and clean the room or clean Joey’s footprints!
- Raise your Tamagotchi character from egg to baby to adult, and how you take care of it will decide which of the 7 Adults you’ll get. This version of Hello Kitty will reveal 2 new Adults!
- If you take good care of your Tamagotchi character, it will go on a journey to London with Hello Kitty! But if the Tamagotchi character is sad for too long, it will run away from home
What is missing for a faithful rebuild?
The exact CYD variant and board revision are not identified, and the article does not provide the display’s ESPHome YAML or other configuration files. A community discussion documents ESPHome examples for CYD hardware, including one ESP32-2432S028R variant, but that does not establish that it is the board Davidson used. Check the exact hardware revision before relying on a configuration or assuming compatibility. [Home Assistant Community: Use ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display for home assistant data]
The official documentation explains the roles of the Proxmox VE integration and ESPHome, but it does not provide this project’s display layout or entity configuration. Without those specifics, the story supports the overall data flow and behavior—not a copy-and-paste build guide. [Home Assistant: Proxmox VE] [Home Assistant: ESPHome]
Quick Recap
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