My Mini PC hosts several homelab services, including Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Calibre, Uptime Kuma, and more. It also hosts some local LLMs, and in recent weeks, one of these has been hogging so much RAM that it's brought down other services. I decided to set up a fun way to monitor my homelab using a cheap ESP32 board.

My Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) may be one of the most useful devices in my home, especially for the price. It's an ESP32 board with a built-in color touchscreen display, making it ideal for a wide range of projects.

I use my CYD to quickly add music from Apple Music and Spotify discovery playlists to a custom playlist of my own just by tapping the screen. I can then play through this playlist and, with another tap, add the artist's latest album to my library. It's helped me discover a lot of great music far more easily.

I then added another feature to the CYD that displays a Tamagotchi. The little character's health depends on how long I sit in my office chair, as measured by a presence sensor. If I sit too long, the character loses health and eventually dies, but if I get up regularly, the creature slowly evolves over time.

So far, my Tamagotchi has helped me stand up much more often. The character only evolves if I stand up regularly each day for five days in a row, and when it dies, it goes back to its original form, so it gives me just enough incentive to keep getting up rather than starting from scratch.

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