AI Passport

meta-pass is a multi-firmware launcher I wrote for AI Passport. A persistent launcher sits on the device, firmware images are installed into Flash slots and you select which one to boot from a startup list instead of reflashing the whole device every time. The two-day MVP process is documented in the previous post. Not useful. This thing takes up 3MB, leaving only two 2MB slots. Anything slightly practical won’t fit. The comment was mostly right. Over the next six days, I submitted 90 commits, working through eight comments one by one and iterated meta-pass from MVP to v1.0: three slots, signature badges, backup and restore, single-file firmware, data-safe upgrades, bootloader hardening and a USB speedup. Most of the v1.0 changes were directly driven by those comments. ...

Last week I got a FoloToy AI Passport, an AI conversation toy driven by an ESP32. It has a plays marketplace with quite a few firmware toys[1]. A couple caught my eye: one turns the device into a walkie-talkie over Bluetooth, another uses BLE for a radar treasure hunt. Plenty of community work worth trying too. Lots of toys, but one awkward reality: the device runs only one firmware at a time. Switching from the walkie-talkie to the treasure hunt means opening a laptop, plugging in a cable, and reflashing the entire chip. Once you reflash, the previous toy is gone. Out in the park with my kid, one minute it’s the walkie-talkie; if the next minute calls for the radar game, too bad. That has to wait until we get home. ...