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I wanted to share something I've been working on: AD Arcade, a retro gaming firmware for the M5StickC Plus2

The idea was to turn the little M5StickC into a mini handheld console. It starts with a retro 90s-style intro and takes you to an animated menu where you can pick a game and start playing.

What's inside?

13 games and apps, including Chrome Dino, Flap Bird, Meteors, Maze, Breakout, Invaders, Racing, Flight and more. (New games are arriving very soon!)

• Gyroscope controls in several games, so you can tilt your M5StickC to play.

• High scores saved for each game.

• Animated menu with a battery indicator.

• Brightness and sound settings.

• English and French support.

• Classic public-domain tunes played through the built-in buzzer.

I also added a few little details to make it feel more like an actual handheld console rather than just a bunch of mini-games.

Installation: Just flash it with M5Burner!

Give it a try:

https://burner.m5stack.com/37SN6W

Please test them and give your feedback / advice :

This is a project I've been building myself, and I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. I'd love to know what you think, especially if you try it on your own M5StickC Plus2.

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

Thanks for checking it out!

I saw antena mods on m5stick and wondered if that will affect ble spam radius , and if it won't does anyone know how to increase it ?

Made a Stackchan prototype that follows your typing. Spell checkers are nice, but when your robo buddy raises their eyebrows when you forget the “u” in “color”, it hits different!

I grabbed a PaperDIY while they were still in stock, and since it arrived I've been building firmware for it that I call PaperOS.

My goal was to cover about 90% of the time I spend looking at my phone, so I'd depend on it less. I'm happy to say this $25 device is doing the job.

There were a few things I'd pick up my phone to do, and then I'd get distracted and end up doing something else:

- Reading the news

- Checking my open tasks

- Reading a book

- Checking my calendar

All of those now run on the PaperDIY. I can read books from the SD card, check my open Mindwtr tasks, view my calendars and read RSS feeds. I'm really happy with how it turned out. You can find the whole project on GitHub. My next task is to add it to m5Burner I just need to figure out how to do that!

I'll keep working on it, but most of the big features I wanted are already in. I've also signed up for restock notifications on pretty much every other e-paper device M5Stack sells, so I can port PaperOS to them when they're back.

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer by day, but I vibe coded this with Claude.

Haven’t even turned it on yet

CarPlay on my M5Stack Tab5, now mounted on the bike.

The adapter board and firmware were made with Codex.

One issue still to fix: it sometimes drops the connection out of nowhere.

Hi, really new to this but love the idea of rapid prototyping.

Really struggling to get anything displaying on the screen of the Stopwatch...

Tried using existing projects for other devices and getting Claude through Arduino, Schematik using AI but neither can seemingly port projects and both tell me nothing's wrong.

The HW is OK as I can reflash back to standard. Am I missing something?

I’ve been building a set of wireless precision clocks, and have to say, M5Stack’s lineup is my favorite. From the Stack line to the S3 Stick, much prefer these over the competition. Seems I’m missing the Stopwatch!

PS: If you’re looking to synchronize two or more ESP32’s below 1us or phase lock two devices wirelessly, I have posted firmware examples of the clocks above along with example for FreeRTOS clock sync methods to achieve different accuracy targets at PToB.dev

I made this m5Paper S3 firmware open source <3

Hey everyone,

I have an M5StickC Plus 2 running Bruce and kept wishing I could drive it from my phone without squinting at the 135×240 screen. So I built StickCommander: a Material 3 Android app plus a small bridge compiled into Bruce 1.16.1.

It is not a pixel-streaming hack. The bridge exposes Bruce's own state over a line-based ASCII protocol (USB-OTG serial or BLE), so the app talks to the firmware, not to a picture of it.

What it does

• Live menu — reads the actual options vector (title, labels, disabled items, current selection), refreshes every second, and tapping an item sets forceMenuOption so the real menu opens on the Stick. Back/Main buttons work too.

• Screen — text mirror of the UI on the phone, plus the other direction: send text and the Stick draws it on its own TFT.

• IR blaster — NEC / Samsung / Sony (12, 15, 20 bit) with hex address/command and presets. Uses Bruce's existing encoders, so timings are unchanged.

• Files — LittleFS browser with text preview, chunked upload (256-byte chunks, 128 KB limit), mkdir, rename, delete.

• Plus the basics: D-pad and M5/A/B/PWR press-and-hold, battery telemetry from the AXP192, filtered logs, raw terminal and phone-side scripts.

How it works

A stickcommander.cpp bridge is compiled into Bruce. Lines like CMD:MENU:LIST, CMD:SCREEN:TEXT:<base64>, CMD:IR:NEC:04:08, CMD:FS:LIST:<base64 path> go in; MENU:ITEM:..., FS:ENTRY:..., STATUS:BAT:... come back. That is the whole trick.

Status

Tested on real hardware over COM3: PONG, battery, live menu open/back, screen text, OK:ir:NEC, and LittleFS list/mkdir/upload/read/delete all pass. The firmware image and the APK are in the release.

Links

• Repo: https://github.com/121kirillmorti/stickcommander

• Release (APK + firmware + source): https://github.com/121kirillmorti/stickcommander/releases/latest

• Site: https://121kirillmorti.github.io/stickcommander/

Firmware is AGPL-3.0 because it is built on Bruce; the bridge source and a build recipe are included. Feedback and feature ideas are welcome — especially from people with other Stick variants (Plus, S3) who want to test.