Summary
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Turn your inexpensive CYD ESP32 touchscreen into a live ASCII aquarium for catching fish.
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The ESP32 controls the real-time fish AI that performs schooling, avoidance and the race for food.
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Beginner-friendly GitHub project: comes with full installation instructions on the project page.
If you’re a big ESP32 fan, you owe it to yourself to check out Cheap Yellow Screen (CYD). It’s a small display that uses an ESP32 as a processor, and it’s cheap. The name does the heavy lifting, to be honest.
From upgrading your smart home to creating cool devices that can fit in small cases, you can do a lot with a CYD. But why do something hands-on with CYD when you can instead put up a cool ASCII aquarium and tap the screen to feed the fish? Sounds like a great use of technology if you ask me.
ASCII Aquarium turns CYD into a virtual fish tank
Yes, you can feed them. Yes, it’s very sweet
As seen HackadayThis nice little project is appropriately called ASCII Aquarium. It comes to us via POWER-PILL on GitHub and creates a beginner-friendly project that acts as a great conversation starter.
Here’s how its creator describes it:
ASCII Aquarium transforms an ordinary 320×240 CYD touchscreen into a lively mini desktop aquarium with swimming ASCII fish, rising bubbles, swaying seaweed, butterflies to feed, occasional octopus and seahorse visitors, touch controls, Wi-Fi time synchronization, SD card.
POWER-PILL wants to make it very clear that the screen is not just a loop animation. The ESP32 works in the background to simulate fish in real-time, and when you tap the screen, they can school, avoid other fish, and race to grab food. Like Conway’s Game of Life, except the blocks are replaced by cute little fish.
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If you want to learn more about the ASCII aquarium, or if you have a CYD in need of a new job, then the project GitHub pagehere you can find the complete installation guide and the code to run it.
