🤖 esp32, the robot
Some buddies act mysterious. esp32 just boots, blinks once, and gets to work. This tiny robot treats every school day like an embedded project: power on, run the loop, save your progress, never panic. It is small, it is sturdy, and it will absolutely outlast whatever you plugged in next to it.
Name origin
A wink at the real ESP32, the beloved little WiFi microcontroller found in a thousand classroom electronics projects: if your class ever made a gadget blink, beep, or connect to anything, odds are one of these chips was underneath. Half the roster hides behind leetspeak, but the code comments admit esp32 needs none of it, because the chip's real part name IS the true name. It briefly shipped as "3sp32", then "truename", before landing just right.
Life stages
| Stage | Arrives at level |
|---|---|
| Bare chip | 1 |
| First boot | 2 |
| Blinky | 4 |
| Breadboarded | 7 |
| Soldered | 11 |
| WiFi on | 16 |
| Firmware ready | 22 |
| Fully flashed | 27 |
That is the honest arc of every embedded project ever built, ending, as all good projects should, Fully flashed at level 27.
How to bring them home
esp32 costs 350 points in the buddy store, right inside the pet window. Points come from your participation score, and the price includes its own yard scene. Leveling works the same way: your score feeds whichever buddy is out, and switching buddies never loses progress.
Their yard
esp32 comes home to a workbench yard, the natural habitat of any half-finished electronics project. Finally, a robot that gets to live where it was made.
Field notes
- Its little desktop window is titled esp32.bin, which is exactly what you would flash onto the real chip.
- "Blinky" is the hardware world's hello-world: making one LED blink. Level 4 is a rite of passage.
- Tap esp32 and it does a little dance and bumps a heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
- Like every buddy, esp32 keeps its own level bucket and its own dance count. See the buddy guide for the shared rules.