M5Stick SE (the bridge)

One board, and the project has settled on it. The M5Stick SE is a stick-shaped ESP32 with a screen, a battery and a button, and it is what turns Flash Force from a web page into a remote control you can carry.

The page can reach a Bluetooth hub on its own. It cannot reach anything optical: a browser has no infrared and no way to blink a lamp to the millisecond. The Stick has both.

What it does that the page cannot

• Infrared. RCX, Scout and Power Functions (IR) all hear it.
• Light. It flashes VLL at a Micro Scout — see How the links work.
• Advertising. Mould King 6.0 is driven by broadcasting rather than connecting, which a browser is not allowed to do at all.
• A gamepad, with no phone. It pairs a controller itself and holds five layouts in its own memory, so a model runs with the phone switched off.

The screen

Battery, which hubs are up, which controller is paired and which of the five slots is loaded. It is the only place that shows all of it at once.

Boards that are not the answer

Evaluated and rejected: M5Stack NanoC6 (the first bridge, left the project in August 2026), ESP32-S3 (the only one that can HEAR infrared, so it stays on the list), Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, HotRC CT-10B with its F-10A receiver for radio at range. The controller side of the firmware is Bluepad32.

Links

• Board: m5stack.com · VLL emitters — options & status
• Firmware and images ship with the site: the Firmware panel on the Control Panel writes them over USB.