stackchan-live

An original, MIT-licensed firmware and Mac runtime for real-time English and Japanese conversation with Stack-chan. It does not use the factory application or vendor UI.

The project provides:

• custom ESP32-S3 firmware with an animated face, head motion, lights, audio, top-touch input, and privacy-visible camera stills for photo and direct “look at me” requests;
• laptop-local Whisper STT, Supertonic TTS, audio scheduling, and SQLite memory;
• Vercel Eve intelligence with bilingual conversation, skills, and typed tools;
• pluggable cascade and OpenAI Realtime speech-to-speech providers;
• eight coordinated expression routines, six original music styles, and reproducible software and hardware-in-the-loop benchmarks.

Physical voice interruption remains experimental. Current evidence and known limits are tracked in the completion audit.

Agent-assisted setup

Paste this into Codex, Claude, or another coding agent:

Set up this stackchan-live repository end to end by following docs/setup.md. Use Pixi, preserve the Stack-chan Wi-Fi/NVS, never print secrets, ask before flashing connected hardware, then run pixi run start and verify service health and the device connection.

Architecture

flowchart LR
    U(["You<br/>EN / 日本語"]) <-->|"voice"| S["Stack-chan<br/>custom ESP32-S3 firmware"]
    S <-->|"PCM audio + control"| M["Mac · local<br/>Whisper · Supertonic · SQLite"]
    M <-->|"selected context + reply"| A["Eve + GPT-5.6 Luna<br/>conversation · skills · tools"]

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Start

Complete the first-time setup, then start the whole laptop runtime with one command:

pixi run start

This starts Eve, Whisper, Supertonic, memory, and the realtime device server. Press Ctrl-C to stop everything it started. Runtime logs are written under artifacts/logs/.

Firmware

pixi run firmware-build
pixi run firmware-upload

Normal uploads preserve Wi-Fi credentials stored in the device's NVS. Do not erase the flash if those credentials must be retained.

Verify

pixi run check

See the setup guide, benchmark results, Eve integration, and protocol for the detailed operator and development references.

Safety

Head motion is bounded and rate-limited. Do not force a powered servo by hand.

License

Project code and original artwork are released under the MIT License. The official M5Stack mechanical assets in third_party/M5_Hardware/ retain their upstream license and notice.