Dash-Chan 0.2.0 beta — Meet your copilot

Dash-Chan 0.2.0 beta

Meet the pet-centered Dash-Chan for the official M5Stack StackChan K151: passive Wi-Fi/BLE awareness, GPS wardriving to SD, and an offline companion with personality.

Open the web flasher and Buddy Lab · First adventure · Flash and recover · Handbook

What's new

• The pet stays home during watching, wardriving, and alerts. Three original companions, custom colors/accessories/name, four themes, and the supplied BWM/VTS boot logos.
• Voice starts OFF. MENU → Sound & Voice → Voice OFF disables speech. Master sound OFF silences everything. Head petting is visual only; deliberate face-tap speech is limited to once per minute when enabled. Existing mute preferences persist.
• Bounded relaxed head gestures and expressive panic, optional spoken catchphrases, configurable detection tones, affection, and wardriving-only food.
• Continuous encounters announce once by default, recent sightings update quietly, family cooldowns reduce rotating-address alerts, and optional reminders start off.
• Expanded passive probe/receiver-header methods, local watchlists, qualified traffic-pattern hints, and a method-by-method audit of Dragon Detector, Unified Blue, and SquachWatch references.
• Faster channel/BLE sweep with fresh-GPS gates, proper AP-versus-client separation, WiGLE 1.4 CSV, per-session food deduplication, and separate detection events.
• Self-hosted web installer with backup, chip/flash-size checks, SHA-256 download checks, written-image verification, preserved NVS calibration, and explicit reset. Buddy Lab can export an SD profile or upload directly to running firmware.

Install

Use desktop Chrome/Edge and a USB data cable with the web flasher, or extract the attached ZIP and follow INSTALL.txt. Retain a full private factory backup first. Do not erase the entire flash: it contains servo calibration. The installer does not format the SD card. GPS goes on blue Port C; select its baud in GPS & SD.

The ZIP below is the verified GitHub Actions artifact used for this site's deployment. Split images, SHA-256 sums, source links, and component license notices are included. This build is only for the official K151 with 16 MB flash / 8 MB PSRAM.

Validation and limits

Firmware and protocol regression tests pass, including 50,000 malformed inputs and WiGLE CSV round trips. Browser checks cover desktop and 320/390/768 px layouts, creator export, and refusal/error paths. On the development robot, a bench drive saved 77 GPS-tagged rows, credited 13 new Wi-Fi discoveries, reopened its log, and reported zero queue drops. The web flashing module was exercised against the robot through a local serial bridge: four image checks, preserved NVS, reboot, and avatar acknowledgement passed.

This remains a beta. Known-device detection accuracy, long outdoor-drive stability, and actual WiGLE server acceptance are not established by those checks. Radio signatures are clues, not proof of identity, police presence, recording, or intent. Native coverage is 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and BLE. Complete methods and limitations.

Credits

Thanks to Dragon Detector, skizzophrenic/SquachWatch, Colonel Panic/Unified Blue/Flock-You/AXEOFF, JustCallMeKoko, Midwest Gadgets/Piglet, M5Stack, Espressif, OpenDroneID, and the upstream device researchers. Pinned sources, exact reuse, and licensing. Original Dash-Chan avatars; supplied BWM/VTS marks remain their owners' brands. GPL-3.0-or-later with retained component notices.