lagerpun/esp32-cyd-aquarium

This project turns a small, inexpensive touchscreen board into a self-running animated aquarium you can leave on your desk. The board it targets is the ESP32-2432S028R, sometimes called the Cheap Yellow Display, a 2.8-inch color screen with a built-in microcontroller that costs a few dollars. Once you flash this firmware onto the board, it boots straight into an aquarium scene and runs on its own without any further input. The aquarium scene plays out on the screen as if it were a tiny LED grid. Fish, turtles, snakes, octopuses, and smaller drifting creatures move around autonomously. Plants sway in the background, food particles drift downward, and animated water fills the scene. A 12-hour clock with the date is overlaid on the display at all times. The board dims its own backlight automatically based on ambient light, using a sensor already built into the hardware. Wi-Fi is entirely optional. If you provide your home network credentials before flashing, the board connects briefly to sync the time from the internet and then disconnects. If you skip Wi-Fi entirely, the clock falls back to the time the firmware was compiled, which is close enough for a desk decoration. Optionally, tapping the touchscreen triggers a feeding animation. Installing it requires a free tool called PlatformIO, which handles downloading the right libraries and compiling the code for this specific board. The README includes commands for building and flashing, along with separate documentation pages covering hardware quirks, Wi-Fi setup, and troubleshooting for boards that behave slightly differently from the tested model. The project is adapted from an earlier open-source aquarium animation made for a different type of LED panel. The author reworked it for the Cheap Yellow Display hardware. The license is AGPL-3.0, inherited from that upstream project.