jgordon510/esp32_cyd_wordle

CYD Wordle is a MicroPython project that turns the ESP32 based Cheap Yellow Display board into a small standalone Wordle machine. On boot, the device connects to your Wi-Fi network, checks the date for your configured time zone, downloads that day's real New York Times Wordle answer, then disconnects from Wi-Fi to free up memory before starting the game. From that point on, everything runs offline on the device itself. The game plays like the familiar word puzzle: you get six guesses to find a five letter word, with letters colored green, yellow, or gray as hints, and an on screen keyboard that recolors as you play and never downgrades a key from green. You tap letters on the touchscreen to spell a guess, tap any square in the current row to move the cursor there, and submit with a dedicated key that turns green once you have typed a real word from the built in dictionary. To use it, you flash MicroPython onto the ESP32 CYD board, set your Wi-Fi name, password, and time zone in a small configuration file, then copy the project files onto the board with the mpremote tool. The code is organized into a handful of files: the main program handling boot, networking, drawing, and game logic, a color palette helper, a touch screen driver, and the word list itself, which is stored as a fixed size, sorted file on the board's flash storage and searched directly rather than loaded into memory, since the ESP32 does not have much RAM to spare. The project notes that memory is the tightest constraint on this hardware: the secure connection needed to fetch the daily word requires a large block of free memory, so the code cleans up and drops the Wi-Fi connection before starting the game loop. It fetches the current date from a free public time API and the daily puzzle from a public New York Times endpoint, neither of which requires an API key. It is released under the MIT license, and touch calibration may need adjusting since touchscreen panels vary from unit to unit.