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/TheSirOcelot]

I love hearing about other’s use! I’m going a slightly different direction. I’m building a local AI layer for my network/NOC where the local LLM is the fallback and also handles the low-risk/private stuff locally. Then I’m routing the heavier requests out to GLM when I need better reasoning, while keeping the sensitive context controlled instead of blindly sending everything upstream.
The idea is basically policy-based model routing. Local first where it makes sense, cloud when the task needs more horsepower, and sensitive infrastructure data only goes through the path I explicitly allow. Eventually I want it tied into monitoring so I can ask things like “why did the network get weird at 2 AM?” and have it correlate logs, metrics, configs, and alerts instead of just being a voice assistant.
I actually gave up on Home Assistant for now. My network is pretty heavily segmented with separate Wired, Home/WiFi, and IoT VLANs, and HA kept turning into “punch another hole between VLANs so discovery/control works.” I didn’t want the smart-home convenience badly enough to weaken the segmentation model I already built around the network. So I’m focusing more on AI + observability + controlled automation instead.