I got one of these lovely M5StickCs for a present, and had a play with it as part of Makevember. I wanted to make a “push puppet” (one of those toys that you push upwards and they collapse) that reacted to Slack commands. Not for any reason really, though I like the idea of tiny colleagues that stand up when addressed on slack. Makevember doesn’t need a reason. Or at any rate, it doesn’t need a good reason.

Here are some notes about https and websockets on the ESP32 pico which is the underlying board for the M5StickC.

I made a “slack wobbler” a couple of years ago, also in makevember – an ESP8266 that connected to slack, then wobbled when someone was mentioned, using a servo. Since then I ran into some https problems, obviously also encountered by Jeremy21212121 who fixed it using a modified version of a websockets server. This works for the ESP8266 – turns out you can also get the same result using httpsClient.setInsecure() using BearSSL. I’ve put an example of that here.

For ESP32 it seems a bit different. As far as I can tell you need the certificate not the fingerprint in this case. You can get it using openssl s_client -connect api.slack.com:443

For ESP32 you also need to use the correct libraries for wifi and wifimulti. The websocket client library is this one.

And a final note – the M5StickC is very cool but doesn’t enable you to use many of its GPIO ports. The only one I can find that allows you to use a servo directly is on the Grove connector, which I bodged some female jumper wires into, though you can get a grove to servo converter (there are various M5Stick hats you can use for multiple servos). Here’s some code. And a video.