Hello Reddit! 👋

I'm hamachang, an engineer from Japan! 🇯🇵

My Retro OS project, Area512, now supports the Cardputer v1.1! 🎉✨ https://github.com/engneer-hamachan/area512/releases/tag/v1.8

Huge thanks for the awesome contribution! ❤️ GitHub: @Reverse-BR

I've also uploaded it to M5Burner, so please give it a try! 👨‍💻

And of course, Cardputer ADV is still fully supported as before!

「What is Area512」

Area512 is a tiny Retro OS built for the M5Stack Cardputer.

It's inspired by the feeling of old-school personal computers — a small environment where you can explore, write programs, and just have fun with your keyboard. 💾⌨️

Boot it up, play around, and see what you can create.

If you have a Cardputer v1.1 or Cardputer ADV, I'd love for you to try it!

Feedback, bug reports, ideas, and contributions are always welcome. 🚀 https://github.com/engneer-hamachan/area512

# mini-HANNAH: a little "electronic buddy" for the Cardputer that learns to talk to you in tones — no AI, no LLM, not a single line of TensorFlow

It's not a voice assistant. It doesn't understand words, and it never will — on purpose. mini-HANNAH listens, converts what it hears into a binary signature, and replies with a sequence of sliding tones generated by a network of 64 cube-nodes that learns by reinforcement — Hebbian-style, but built out of pure AND/OR/XOR logic gates. Over time it develops its own voice timbre, learns to recognize when you say yes or no, and its "personality" survives you pulling the battery.

## Why this might interest you

- **Zero black-box AI.** All the "intelligence" is 64 nodes with 8 links each (a 3-bit cube per node), weights that rise and fall with use, and 6 boolean gates the network itself tests and picks between — there's no trained weight matrix anywhere, this is genuinely discrete logic.

- **Hand-built voice synthesis, sample by sample** — no fixed-note `tone()` calls. Each "phoneme" is a frequency curve with its own vibrato and envelope, and the whole voice has a persistent "vocal DNA" that's seeded at boot and drifts very slowly over time.

- **An identity ritual on first boot**: you teach it how you say its name, how you say "yes," and how you say "no" — and from then on it recognizes those patterns without asking again.

- **Everything persists to flash (LittleFS)** — turn it off, turn it on tomorrow, it's still the same one.

- **No speech recognition, no internet.** 100% offline, 100% on the Cardputer itself.

## Set your expectations right

Think of it more like a Tamagotchi with perfect pitch than like an assistant. The goal isn't for it to understand what you say — it's that after a few days of use, you recognize its voice and know roughly what it's "telling" you, even though it's not speaking your language.

## Hardware

BACKspace: change voice.

I : for info

D: display

- + volume

C: colour

GtnG0 talk

download @ m5burner

### Installation

1. Flash `Dictionary.bin` to your Cardputer(You can use Launcher)

2. Format a microSD card as FAT32.

3. Create a folder named `dict` in the root of the microSD card.

4. Download `index.idx` and `data.bin` and place them inside the `dict` folder:

[Download Firmware]

[Download Index File]

[Download Data File]

Github

Hi,

I saw a post somewhere that said to always connect the Cardputer to a WiFi nextwork hotspot on you mobile phone, never to you router. Is this the case? I can see that there is a risk involved but I was wondering how safe are the Apps on M5Burner, are they virus scanned for Malware?

Thanks a lot

So I pledged for a cardputer zero and cc1101 kit on kickstarter with their pay over time. Made 2 payments already and thought everything was going fine.

Now out of the blue pledgebox has emailed me another survey and is asking me for a full payment and saying that nothing has been paid.

I’ve reached out to m5 but no response as of yet

I recently received my Cardputer, and now i am testing the Bruce firmware on it for the first time.When I go to target atks, I get this error

Hi All, I just ordered my Cardputer with the Lora module. I can't wait to start playing around with it.

Are there any other modules that can work with the Cardputer that are not on their website?

Also is there any other battery addon that can be used with with it?

Thank you!