AI Pin — Wearable AI Voice Assistant on XIAO ESP32S3 Sense

A pocket/wearable AI Pin built around the Seeed XIAO ESP32S3 Sense. It runs a voice assistant with wake-word interaction, an on-board OLED for status, an RGB status LED, and a camera for vision — all driven by the open-source xiaozhi-esp32 firmware framework, with a custom board bring-up for this hardware.

📺 Demo video: https://youtu.be/4tEngx4ffeQ

What's in this repo

• board/board_config.h — my custom board definition (pin map) for the XIAO ESP32S3 Sense build: PDM mic, MAX98357 speaker, SSD1306 OLED, RGB LED, and OV3660 camera.
• prebuilt/ — ready-to-flash firmware binaries so you can try it without setting up ESP-IDF.

Hardware

Component	Detail
MCU board	Seeed XIAO ESP32S3 Sense (8 MB flash, PSRAM)
Microphone	Built-in PDM mic — CLK GPIO42, DATA GPIO41
Speaker amp	MAX98357 (I2S) — BCLK GPIO43, LRCK GPIO5, DOUT GPIO7
Display	SSD1306 128×64 OLED (I2C) — SDA GPIO1, SCL GPIO2
RGB LED	R GPIO8, G GPIO19, B GPIO20
Camera	OV3660 (see board/board_config.h for the full pin map)
Button	BOOT GPIO0

See board/board_config.h for the complete, commented pin map.

Flash the prebuilt firmware

Requires esptool (pip install esptool). Put the XIAO ESP32S3 Sense into bootloader mode if needed, then from the prebuilt/ folder:

esptool.py --chip esp32s3 -b 460800 \
  --before default_reset --after hard_reset \
  write_flash --flash_mode dio --flash_freq 80m --flash_size 8MB \
  0x0      bootloader.bin \
  0x8000   partition-table.bin \
  0xd000   ota_data_initial.bin \
  0x20000  xiaozhi.bin \
  0x600000 generated_assets.bin

(These offsets come from prebuilt/flasher_args.json.) After flashing, follow the on-device / xiaozhi setup to connect WiFi and pair the assistant.

Build from source

The firmware is built on xiaozhi-esp32. To rebuild:

1. Clone the upstream framework: git clone https://github.com/78/xiaozhi-esp32
2. Add a board using the pin map in board/board_config.h (based on the XIAO ESP32S3 Sense / camera board type).
3. With ESP-IDF v5.4+: idf.py set-target esp32s3 && idf.py menuconfig (select the board type), then idf.py build flash.

Credits & license

Firmware framework: xiaozhi-esp32 by @78, MIT License. This repository contains my custom board configuration and a build of that framework for the AI Pin hardware; all credit for the underlying assistant framework goes to the upstream project. See LICENSE.