TamaFi V2: I Rebuilt My WiFi-Aware Pocket Pet

I’m back with TamaFi V2, a full rebuild of my open-source WiFi-aware virtual pet, and almost none of the original code survived the process. TamaFi started as a simple idea. A pocket pet that gets hungry from WiFi activity instead of a feed button. It worked, but the face was a sprite sheet, the reactions were instant and a little lifeless, and there was no companion app. This time, I had one goal: rebuild it into something that actually feels alive, on hardware that has real limits I had to design around. What TamaFi Actually Is TamaFi is a pocket pet on a custom ESP32-S3 board. It tracks six stats, hunger, energy, happiness, health, curiosity, and comfort, and it reads WiFi and Bluetooth activity around it as its sensor input. In this build, that’s read-only. No transmitting, no saved SSIDs or MAC addresses. It runs fully standalone, no app required. There’s also a desktop companion app now, TamaFi Lab, which I’ll get into further down, including the USB issues that came with…