Piko Is A Tamagotchi-Style Fitness Buddy On Your Wrist

Fitness trackers tend to reduce activity to a number on a screen — steps, heart rate, calories. Piko, built by Iloke Alusala, Lulama Lingela, and Rafael Cardoso, takes a more playful approach: instead of a number, you get a little pixel-art character that visibly mimics what you’re doing.

What They Built

Piko is a wrist-worn fitness tracker built around an ESP32 Beetle C6, a LIS331HH accelerometer, a 240x240 IPS TFT display, and a 200mAh battery. The accelerometer data drives a hand-drawn character on screen that shifts between idle, walking, jogging, and sprinting poses depending on how active you currently are — a Tamagotchi-style stand-in for your activity level rather than a plain stat readout.

How They Did It

The team 3D printed the watch’s parts in their university makerspace and released the firmware under an MIT license, alongside a clear bill of materials. Translating raw accelerometer readings into a believable, non-jittery activity state for the character to react to is the kind of detail that’s easy to get wrong — too sensitive and the character flails between states constantly, too sluggish and it stops feeling responsive.

Why It’s Worth Your Time

The pixel-character framing is a genuinely fun UI choice layered on top of an otherwise fairly standard ESP32 fitness build, and because the code and parts list are both fully open, it’s one of the more approachable projects in this batch for someone who wants to actually replicate it rather than just admire it.

Go See It

Piko’s project page is on Hackaday.io, with additional coverage from Hackaday.