What have you built? M5Stack wants to know

M5Stack: the open-source ecosystem makers love is ready to be touched

Some companies come to a fair with a catalog to show off, and others come with a question: what have you built? For the fourteenth edition of Maker Faire Rome, M5Stack takes the second road. A partner of the event and already in Rome in 2025, the Shenzhen-based company returns to the Gazometro Ostiense from 23 to 25 October with a booth designed as a meeting place rather than a showcase. The question is aimed above all at people who already use its products: if you have built something with M5Stack boards, you are invited to bring it to the booth and show it to the team, and in return you will receive a limited-edition Maker Faire Rome T-shirt, while supplies last. If you arrive empty-handed, you can still take part in a giveaway featuring StopWatch, one of the company’s most recent devices. And that is where it makes sense to start, because it is an object you understand better with your hands than with words. StopWatch looks like the stopwatch of someone who goes running in the park on a Sunday morning. Then you turn it over, and it has a round AMOLED screen, a microphone, a speaker and an ESP32-S3 inside. It is one of M5Stack’s newest arrivals, launched last May, and it isn’t meant for timing things (though it can do that). It is a development board disguised as a watch: it sits on your wrist, just waiting for someone to decide what to do with it.

A development board you wear on your wrist

There is a lot under the hood. The 1.75-inch touchscreen, with a resolution of 466 x 466 pixels, sits alongside two programmable buttons and a small motor that makes the device vibrate. Inside there is a six-axis motion sensor, a real-time clock, a microphone and a 1-watt speaker. Memory is generous (16 MB of flash and 8 MB of PSRAM), there is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE connectivity, and a 450 mAh battery makes it completely independent of the computer. For anyone who wants to connect something else, there is a Grove connector and an expansion header with GPIO pins. It is designed for electronic badges, wearable interfaces and small IoT terminals, in other words for everything you would rather wear than leave on your desk, and it costs around $45. You program it with Arduino or UiFlow2, and the official documentation even includes a tutorial for turning it into a personal voice assistant. The point, in short, isn’t what it does when you first switch it on, but everything you can build on top of it.

An ecosystem that clicks together

StopWatch is one tile in a bigger mosaic. M5Stack is a modular, open-source IoT development platform. The idea is simple: there is a central controller, the “core”; there are modules that stack on top of one another; there are sensors and units that connect without soldering; and some models have magnetic bases compatible with Lego bricks. Anyone who has ever built a prototype with jumper wires and a breadboard knows how valuable that convenience is.

The catalog has grown a lot. It covers controllers, displays, wireless communication modules, sensors, actuators, audio, robotics hardware and components for artificial intelligence, and it includes boards based on several generations of Espressif chips, from the most widespread to the most recent, because developers have different needs depending on whether they are making a toy or a control system. This year’s novelties include CardputerZero, a pocket-sized Linux computer launched in May, and StackChan, the open-source desktop robot born together with the community and launched on Kickstarter in January.

The software follows the same logic: besides Arduino there are MicroPython, ESP-IDF and UiFlow, the block-based programming environment designed to send code to the device without fuss, which in its second version is also the reference for the newer boards.

From China to the fair, via the workbench

M5Stack was born in Shenzhen, the city makers consider a sort of Mecca of electronics, from a very practical observation by its founder Jimmy Lai: with traditional development boards, it took three to six months to go from a working prototype to a real, deliverable product. From there came the idea, refined in the mid-2010s, of creating stackable modules measuring five by five centimeters, ready-made, stable and combinable, that could accompany an idea all the way to production. The company in fact also offers design and manufacturing services for those who want to industrialize. Growth was rapid. By 2018 the catalog already counted more than sixty products and M5Stack had become a strategic partner of Espressif, the maker of the chips on which much of the range is based, while its boards integrated with Microsoft Azure IoT services. The following year came a collaboration with Japan’s Soracom on a 3G expansion module. In 2025 its work was recognized with the Good Design Award.

The relationship with the maker world is close, and it shows in the places where its products appear. One example is Cardputer, a tiny computer with a 56-key keyboard, a small screen, a microphone, a speaker, a microSD card reader and infrared, programmable with Arduino, UiFlow2, ESP-IDF and PlatformIO. The Adv version also adds a 14-pin expansion connector and a 3.5 mm audio output. It is the kind of object that makes you want to open the editor and try something right away.

Bring your project, go home with a T-shirt

For M5Stack, Maker Faire has a special meaning, because the company says it has grown together with the maker community. It isn’t its first time in Rome: M5Stack was there in 2025 as well, and this year it is among the partners of the event. The booth (M.05) is not meant to be a simple showcase, but a place to spend time in, with interactive activities designed to be tried by hand. The first is a giveaway featuring a StopWatch, so a good reason to drop by even empty-handed. The second is an invitation to those who already use M5Stack products: bring your project, show it to the team and, if you have built something with their boards, receive a limited-edition Maker Faire Rome T-shirt as a gift, while supplies last.

The rest will be up to the fair. The booth aims to be a place to meet, swap ideas, discover what others have built and maybe find the component your project was missing. At Maker Faire, the most useful conversation of the day is often the one with the stranger next to you, who has just solved the very problem you have been racking your brains over for weeks.

Content created as part of the partnership between M5Stack and Maker Faire Rome 2026