Adorable ASCII Aquarium Lives On Your Desk
Kert Gartner's ASCII Aquarium transforms a cheap yellow display into a miniature simulated aquarium featuring ASCII sea creatures. Each creature exhibits unique behaviors and can respond to user interactions, such as feeding. The project also includes various configuration options and can serve as a desk clock.
- ▪The ASCII Aquarium uses a CYD display, which is an ESP32-based development board.
- ▪Each sea creature in the aquarium has its own behaviors and responses.
- ▪Users can interact with the aquarium by tapping on the screen to feed the creatures.
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Record
| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/05/24/adorable-ascii-aquarium-lives-on-your-desk/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 17:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T17:02:33.643Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T17:02:33.643Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6HDbbLEucygN · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Adorable ASCII Aquarium Lives On Your Desk No comments by: Donald Papp May 24, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy [Kert Gartner]’s ASCII Aquarium turns a cheap yellow display (CYD) into a tiny simulated aquarium, complete with ASCII sea creatures each with their own behaviors. There’s all kinds of options and even timekeeping functionality, so the miniature water world can also pull its weight as a desk clock. The fish and other animal movements are not a series of canned animations; each creature has its own behaviors and responses to things like feeding, which is accomplished by tapping on the screen. A hidden menu offers a wide range of configuration and display options, and there’s even an option to export screen contents as bitmaps.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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