A monorepo of microcontroller projects, mostly ESP32. The largest is a robot car that drives on camera input and an LLM's plan. Others cover audio toys, game controller bridges, an ESP-NOW mesh of companion boxes, and a self-balancing robot on the RP2350.
Released firmware can be flashed with the web flasher in Chrome or Edge, with no toolchain installed. Board-specific boot-mode notes are on the page itself (source).
The robocar board story follows the robot car from a 2018 kit to a generated, factory-made carrier board (source).
ESP-IDF builds run in a container, so Docker and just are the only requirements.
git clone https://github.com/laurigates/mcu-tinkering-lab.git
cd mcu-tinkering-lab
just setup-all # Docker images, dev tools, pre-commit hooks
just list-projects # every project module
just robocar-unified::build # build oneBuild, test and CI details are in CONTRIBUTING.md.
| Domain | Projects |
|---|---|
robocar/ |
AI robot car: single-board firmware (XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense), its integrated carrier, bring-up self-test and a Pymunk simulation |
thinkpack/ |
ESP-NOW mesh of companion boxes: brainbox (LLM coordinator), boombox, chatterbox, finderbox, glowbug, mesh-demo |
camera-vision/ |
MJPEG webserver, camera + I2S audio, LLM Telegram bot, Gemini object detection |
audio/ |
BLE gamepad synth, kids' audio toy, melody detector, RFID audiobook player (ESPHome) |
input-gaming/ |
Xbox → Switch bridge, Switch USB proxy, LEGO Boost with an Xbox controller |
networking/ |
IT troubleshooter, WiFi AP test, WireGuard + Home Assistant (ESPHome) |
sensors/ |
24 GHz mmWave presence sensor (ESPHome) |
robotics/ |
Self-balancing robot (XIAO RP2350, Pico SDK) |
usb-tools/ |
ESP32-S3 raw USB relay for facedancer |
games/ |
NFC scavenger hunt |
components/ |
Shared ESP-IDF components: Improv WiFi provisioning, GitHub Releases OTA, ThinkPack libraries |
Most projects have a README in their directory.
- docs/: architecture decisions, requirements, board references, schematics
- CONTRIBUTING.md: development setup, build commands, testing, CI, adding a project
MIT (LICENSE), except the two vendored KiCad libraries under
tools/kicad/lib/, which keep their upstream licences:
kicad-stock/ is a subset of the KiCad
libraries under CC-BY-SA 4.0 with KiCad's design exception
(LICENSE.md), and
seeed-xiao/ is Seeed Studio's, under their MIT
licence (LICENSE).