CoreStack: Fun. Hackable. Flyable Drone. AI-Powered.

[gkgsathish]

Master embedded systems. Build real touch UIs. Run AI offline. Fly a drone you coded yourself - 5 boards, 35+ projects, zero cloud.
Think of CoreStack as a learning journey in a box, not just a component dump. The story is:
Why we built CoreStack
Every great embedded engineer I’ve met started the same way — one board, one blinking LED, one moment where electricity did exactly what they told it to. CoreStack is built to give you that moment on five different architectures, and then keep pushing you further than any single kit ever could.

The problem with most development kits is that they’re built for a single destination. Beginner kits give you one board and 30 components you’ll use once. Advanced kits assume you already know what you’re doing. Neither of them takes you on a journey.
CoreStack is different. It’s a learning progression in a box. You start with one board. You master it. Then you move to the next. By the time you’ve worked through all five, you understand the full landscape of embedded systems — AVR, ARM Cortex-M, Xtensa LX7, RP2350. The vocabulary of the industry.
And then, when you’re ready, the edge AI projects are waiting. Not as a gimmick. As a genuine reward for the skills you’ve built.

The three-stage journey
Stage 1 — Learn each board individually
Each of the five boards has a distinct personality and a distinct place in the real world. Arduino Uno R4 is where most engineers start — approachable, well-documented, a million tutorials. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 introduces MicroPython and the mind-bending concept of PIO state machines. The ESP32-S3 opens up WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The ESP32-CAM adds computer vision as an input. The STM32 Nucleo is what professional firmware engineers use on the job.
CoreStack comes with starter example code for each board, QR-linked documentation, and a toolchain setup guide that covers Arduino IDE, VS Code with ESP-IDF, MicroPython/Thonny, and STM32CubeIDE. You can spend a week on each board and come out the other side speaking four new technical languages.

Stage 2 — Build real projects
Once you know each board, the real learning begins: connecting them. This is where CoreStack’s component set earns its price. The MCP2515 CAN bus module lets you build the same communication architecture used in every car on the road. The SX1278 LoRa module lets you send data three kilometres without WiFi. The RS485 module is how industrial machines talk to each other.
30+ projects in the GitHub repository take you from a simple OLED weather station to a multi-board sensor network. Each project is documented with wiring diagrams, explained code, and a clear description of what real-world problem it solves.

Stage 3 — Unlock AI at the edge
This is the payoff. Once you understand your boards, the edge AI projects click into place intuitively. The ESP32-CAM captures a frame. The ESP32-S3’s LX7 core — with its hardware AI vector extension — runs MobileNetV2 INT8 inference in about 200 milliseconds. No internet connection. No API. No monthly fee. 90 object classes detected entirely on a board smaller than your palm.
The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 runs FFT-based vibration anomaly detection in MicroPython using ulab — the same statistical pattern used by industrial predictive maintenance systems. It learns what normal looks like, then flags deviations in real time.
AI is not the starting point. It’s the destination you reach by learning the fundamentals properly. That’s the CoreStack philosophy.


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/anuelectronics/corestack-5-boards-drone-touch-ui-edge-ai-one-kit