AI Mascot

Summary

AI Mascot is an always-on desk companion: a screen with a character on it that you hold to talk to. It listens, thinks with the AI service you choose, and replies in its own voice and personality. Around that one idea it quietly does more: it shows the time, knows your local weather, shows at a glance how green the national grid is right now, and — where enabled — listens for your smoke and CO alarms and sends an alert to your phone or email when one sounds.

There is no subscription, no cloud account with us, and no app. The device talks directly to the AI backend you configure (a free tier, or a server in your own house), and everything about it is managed from a web page it serves itself on your home network.

Hardware options

One firmware, four boards. All are ESP32-S3 devices with a microphone, speaker and touch screen; they differ in shape and display.

Power is USB-C. A battery-backed unit keeps listening through a power cut (runtime TBD — not yet measured).

Setting up

Wi-Fi

Can’t find your Wi-Fi password? Most routers have it printed on a sticker on the back. iPhone (iOS 16+): Settings → Wi-Fi → ⓘ → tap the password → Copy. Android: Settings → Wi-Fi → your network → view/share.

Setting up by sound

Why you might prefer this. The QR route above asks you to scan a code, join the puck’s own network, scan a second code, and then type a password — on a screen the size of a matchbox. Typing a long password on the smallest of these displays is genuinely unpleasant. Setting up by sound moves all the typing to a device with a proper keyboard, and the puck simply listens.

What to do. Open the Audio Wi-Fi setup page, type your network name and password, hold the phone or laptop about half a metre from the puck with the speaker facing it, turn the volume most of the way up, and press play. The puck shows Heard it in green and joins by itself. It takes about four seconds and sounds like a short burst of electronic music — not unlike a home computer loading from tape in 1982, which is exactly what it is.

Nothing is sent anywhere. The page turns your password into sound in your own browser. It works with the network disconnected, it uploads nothing, and it is a single file you can save and keep. Your credentials exist only as sound in the room and, afterwards, on the puck.

If it doesn’t take. Wait for the QR screen to appear before playing — the puck only listens once it has given up joining a known network. Choose Send four times for a noisy room or a quiet speaker, move a little closer, and avoid talking over it. Every message carries a checksum, so a burst of noise makes the puck ignore that attempt rather than half-hear it; playing again is always safe. The QR route remains available at any time, and never stops working.

Sound travels to anything in earshot, so set up in a room you are comfortable saying your Wi-Fi password aloud in. The puck only ever listens for this during setup, before it has a network — never once it is connected.

Moving the device to a different network

Nervous about taking it somewhere new? You never have to do the first-time setup again if the new network is already saved — the device remembers several networks and simply joins whichever one is in range. Two ways to arrange that in advance:

• Prepare while it still works. Before the move, open the Wi-Fi page on the network where the device is already happy, and use Add a network to save the destination’s name and password. Then just carry it over and plug it in: it finds the new network on its own. This is the right move before a house move, a holiday let, or gifting a configured device onward.
• Ask before it ships. If the device is being sent to you, tell whoever is preparing it your Wi-Fi name and password and they will save it before it goes in the box — it then works from the moment it is first plugged in, with no setup at all.

Logging in to the web page

Open the address shown at the bottom of the device’s screen (http://cores3llm-xxxxxx.local/ or the IP) from any browser on the same network.

Username admin  ·  Password the profile name shown on the device’s screen next to the IP (a brand-new device uses its hostname).

A tour of the web pages

The mascots

Hold and say “switch to owl” — or swipe left/right — to change character. Each mascot is cast, not generated: it speaks in a voice cloned from a particular actor in a particular role, chosen to match its personality.

	Mascot & personality	Voiced by
	Capybara Calm, easy-going, unflappable, friendly to everyone	Bill Nighy Slartibartfast — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
	Cat Cool, elegant, quietly self-assured, dry wit	Alan Rickman Severus Snape — Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
	Chameleon Observant, adaptable, unflappably cool	Gary Oldman Carnegie — The Book of Eli (2010)
	Gerbil Small, bright, upbeat, quick and keen	Michael J. Fox Marty McFly — Back to the Future (1985)
	Labrador Warm, loyal, good-natured	Martin Freeman Bilbo Baggins — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
	Owl Ancient, wise, calm, measured gravitas — Bubo, Athena’s bronze mechanical owl	Ian McKellen Gandalf — The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
	Schnauzer Dignified, bearded gentleman; dry humour	Sean Connery William of Baskerville — The Name of the Rose (1986)
	Bunny Sultry, indulgent, languid — “take it easy”	Nigella Lawson herself — Cook, Eat, Repeat (audiobook)
	Pufferfish Pompous, self-important, cultured, faintly menacing	Tony Jay Judge Claude Frollo — The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
	Yaffle Dry, pedantic scholar and sceptic — “Ridiculous. Fiddlesticks!”	Oliver Postgate Professor Yaffle — Bagpuss (1974)
	Yorkie Blunt, thrifty, permanently unimpressed — flat-cap Yorkshire	Sean Bean Richard Sharpe — Sharpe (1993)

Voices are cloned per mascot on the standard Chatterbox backend. On the Groq fallback, which ships only six stock synthetic voices, each mascot is mapped to the nearest of them instead — the characters survive, the casting does not.

Firmware updates

The easy way: Connectivity → Install latest from GitHub. The device downloads its own board’s build, installs it and reboots. Settings, Wi-Fi, memory and alarm history survive updates.

From a file: the same page accepts a downloaded .bin, or from a computer:

curl -u admin:<profile> --data-binary @firmware.bin http://<device-ip>/update

Full manual flash (recovery, or a factory-fresh board): connect USB and esptool --port <port> write-flash 0x10000 firmware.bin — a first-time install also needs the bootloader/partition images from the release (see INSTALL.md).

What it is like to live with

Entertainment, and a memory that helps

The classic moment: “What’s that Greek food made with chopped cucumber and a white sauce?” — “That would be tzatziki.” The tip-of-the-tongue question that once meant fetching a phone is now just something you say to the capybara. The device keeps a conversation memory, so “and is it hard to make?” works as a follow-up, and “remember this: Ellen is allergic to walnuts” is kept for good.

And some of the fun is simply the company: ask the pufferfish for a weather report, or tell Professor Yaffle something slightly wrong, and see what happens.

For non-technical people, enhanced by configuration

Out of the box it needs nothing but Wi-Fi. But the relative who sets it up can quietly make it far more useful: load the family’s birthdays into its memory and “whose birthday is next?” just works. The person using it never sees a settings page; the person who gave it never needs to visit to adjust it.

The lightest ecological touch

The device itself sips power — a small fraction of a phone (TBD: measured comparison vs Samsung S22). And it is honest about the rest: a round badge on screen shows where the grid’s electricity is coming from right now. Glance at it and choose your moment — the whole point is that checking does not itself cost an AI request.

The house guardian

With alarm detection enabled the device listens continuously for the specific sound patterns of smoke and CO alarms (the international T3 and T4 cadences). It recognises the pattern, not just loudness — the dog and the vacuum cleaner do not trigger it.

Nothing is sent anywhere until a delivery route is configured and its test has succeeded.

Shaped by request

This device is not a focus-grouped product. The features that matter most arrived because a particular person asked for a particular thing — and each request made it better for everyone:

Next in the queue: a daughter pointed out that an unnoticed water leak can do tens of thousands of pounds of damage — quietly, over days. Leak alerts are on the roadmap; they wait on radio hardware (the leak sensors speak Zigbee, which needs either a gateway or a small add-on receiver), so this one is a promise rather than a feature. It is listed here anyway, because that is the honest state of it.

If you want something of your own — a mascot, a voice, a feed, a face — that is how every one of these began. Ask.

What this guide still lacks

An honest gap list, so the guide converges instead of pretending:

1. Quick-start card — one page, five pictures. Distil from Wi-Fi setup once the planned NFC/audio onboarding settles the flow.
2. Specifications table — dimensions, weight, power. Blocked on the power-measurement TODO.
3. Troubleshooting / FAQ — seed from real support moments; every firmware fix should add its symptom here.
4. Safety & regulatory — adapter and battery care, and the load-bearing positioning statement above (notifier, not detector).
5. Privacy statement — audio goes only to your chosen AI backend; feeds to the named public APIs; alerts to your chosen routes; no telemetry, no account. All true today; formalise it.
6. Screen-states glossary — Listening / Thinking / badge colours / bell icon, lifted from the firmware strings so it cannot drift.
7. Factory reset & recovery — write and test the start-over recipe on a sacrificial device.
8. Accessibility notes — volume, speech rate, fonts; the planned dementia face belongs here.
9. Warranty / support — depends on how it is sold; placeholder.