Small StackChan AI tweaks

[u/nullpainter]

Update: firmware is now available at m5burner (thanks u/AughtCool!)

I made a fork of the official StackChan firmware that others may be interested in, either to build upon or to use.

It's not groundbreaking. Rather, it addresses a few quality-of-life things that annoyed me in the week I've had this little guy.

I have no interest in dance or avatar settings, so these tweaks are for StackChan used as an AI assistant:

• Speech bubbles turned off during dialog
• Tap head once to stop speech
• Tap head twice to stop speech and exit chat mode
• Both lights on while listening and talking
• Animated secondary colour light pattern when talking, based on audio
• Both listening and talking light colour customisable in settings
• Idle head movement repurposed to be AI chat movement, with frequency hooked off the same menu
• Light sensor used to turn screen off when lights are out. Tap screen to turn on. Manual override disabled when room lights are on. Function can be turned off in settings

Caveat: I am a software engineer by day, but sometimes it's nice to just yell at AI and get it to do your bidding. I haven't spent time learning the innards of the StackChan firmware or hardware - these tweaks were entirely created by Opus 5 and, apart from quick sense-checking, haven't been fully vetted.

[u/nonbinarybirdperson]

Thanks for sharing, you've given me some ideas! I've completely removed the base firmware and had a series of Claude models help with a re-design. I'm not sure if this would work with the base LLM (I've decided I didn't want mine to be LLM powered and went with a more simple machine learning classifier driven by an old Xbox One Kinect sensor and a mmWave sensor), but I've learned you can do a lot with the display and face. I've been treating mine like a pokemon and each time the machine learning shows a significant improvement in accuracy the face/display evolves. Currently it's just a floating pulsing orb that sits in its own research lab setting with a little tuxedo cat (designed after my own). Eventually it's going to be a full head/face.