Neuroplasters

Work in progress.

More details, interactive demos, and a full 33-lesson course on how to build this are on neuroplaste.ai

I wanted to build something that sits between a tamagotchi and a therapist. Not a chatbot. Not a wellness app. Something small, alive on your desk, that learns how you feel and grows with you over time.

Neuroplasters is that. A family of pixel art pets — cats, dogs, birds — that evolve through five stages as you talk to them, breathe with them, and check in daily. They run on three platforms: a Rust terminal, a website, and a tiny M5Stack device with on-device AI.

Three platforms, one pet

Terminal TUI — the core experience. Built in Rust with ratatui. You talk to your pet, do breathing exercises, watch it grow. Everything persists between sessions. The architecture uses Rust traits for pet polymorphism — each species has its own personality and responses.

  ┌─ neuroplaster ──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Sprout   Bond: 23%   3d streak                             │
  ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │          /\_/\               │  Mood: :) joy                │
  │         ( ^ ^ )              │                              │
  │          > w <               │  Whiskers purrs loudly and   │
  │         /|   |\              │  rubs against you.           │
  │        (_|   |_)             │                              │
  ├──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┤
  │ ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░  120 / 500 XP                │
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │    [t] Talk  [b] Breathe  [p] Pet  [n] Next Pet  [q] Quit  │
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Hardware — M5Stack CoreS3 SE with an AX630C AI accelerator. The pet lives on a small screen, responds to voice and touch, runs inference on-device with Module LLM. No internet needed.

Neuroplaster on M5Stack hardware next to a watch

Neuroplaster website with pixel art pets

Web — the website runs an in-browser AI terminal powered by Qwen2.5 0.5B via Transformers.js. No server, everything runs locally. It also includes a 33-lesson embedded course that covers Rust and frontend development using the actual project code.

How evolution works

Each pet grows through five stages: Seed, Sprout, Bloom, Radiant, Sage. You gain XP from conversations, breathing exercises, and daily streaks. The system tracks mood history with a rolling window and uses a bitmask for 12 achievements.

The idea is simple — the more you engage, the more your pet evolves. And because the pet adapts to your mood patterns over time, it feels less like an app and more like a companion.

Tech

Frontend — React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Framer Motion
Backend — FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Alembic, Google OAuth
Rust — ratatui, crossterm, serde, chrono
Hardware — M5Stack CoreS3 SE, AX630C, PlatformIO
AI — Transformers.js, Voxtral Mini ASR, Module LLM

More coming soon.