A Physical Meme Terminal for Distributed Teams

What happens when you’re hundreds or thousands of miles/kms from your coworkers, but still want to goof around and send them silly meme images? Usually…you use Slack.

But what if you are an IoT company with advanced infrastructure to deliver data, firmware, and troubleshoot hardware all over the globe…and you want to send your coworkers silly images? Well, you put that infrastructure to work and start dogfooding your own platform.

This small, internet-connected displays allows us to try out new things during the holiday season and keep in touch with colleagues across the globe by pushing memes directly to each other’s desks. There’s more explanation below, but we also recorded a video for the nitty-gritty details of how Mike and Dylan built the MePaper 2.0 on a hack day in early December 2025:

The Origins of the MePaper

The MePaper project started in 2022, also around the holidays. While we continue to support our customers with deployed IoT devices 24/7, the working world seems to slow a bit towards the end of the year. We focus on personal development projects and planning as we move towards a new year. But we also continue to hack and try out new things in hardware and firmware.

Mike noticed that we had this great platform in the Adafruit MagTag, a development board that is standard-issue for employees at the company. We had previously used it for in-person and remote training for Zephyr, but hey, how about that ePaper screen on the front?? The board features an ESP32-S2 module, a 2.96-inch ePaper display, an accelerometer, a speaker, and four physical buttons. Because the display is ePaper, the image remains visible even when the device is not actively drawing power, making it an ideal “passive” desk accessory.

The original version of MePaper was a side project that relied on a Slack bot. While it worked, the process of sending a meme was difficult. Users had to manually edit images in software like GIMP to ensure they were the correct size, rotated 90 degrees, and converted to a 1-bit black-and-white format. These files were then hosted on Google Drive and distributed via a complex set of commands.

Modernizing the Software and Hardware

To make the system more usable for coworkers, the project was rebooted during a company hack day into version 2.0. This involved a significant overhaul of the firmware and the user interface for creating and distributing images. But Dylan and Mike wanted to continue to increase usage of platform features.

The firmware was updated from an older version of the Golioth Firmware SDK to a modern release (0.5.0 -> 0.21.0). This required moving to newer peripheral drivers provided by the ESP-IDF framework. One of the primary technical hurdles was memory management. The on-chip SRAM of the ESP32-S2 was not large enough to hold the framebuffer for the images. To solve this, Mike utilized the 2MB of external SPI PSRAM available on the MagTag board/ESP32 module, allowing for smooth image processing and display updates.

The re-written hardware drivers control things like the screen (of course), the buttons, the buzzer, the LEDs. The USB interface, including the serial terminal out of the device, is all captured within the ESP32-S2 module.

For the image format, the project continues to use the Portable Bit Map (PBM) specification. This is a 1-bit color depth format that maps perfectly to the requirements of the ePaper display’s byte-ordering. By using this format, the firmware can simply download the file, strip the simple header, and pipe the data directly to the screen without needing complex decoding libraries.

Building the Vibe-Coded Web Application

The most visible change in version 2.0 is the introduction of a professional-looking web application. This interface was built using “vibe-coding” techniques, where AI agents and large language models were used to generate the front-end code and back-end image databases. This allowed the team to create a sophisticated meme builder without the overhead of manual traditional coding. Compared to 2023, this is much improved.

The new web app eliminates the need for external photo editors. Users can simply upload any image file, and the app provides tools to zoom, reposition, and add custom text to the top or bottom of the meme. Once the user is happy with the preview, they click a button to “beam” the meme to the fleet. The application handles the technical conversion into the PBM format automatically, ensuring the image looks correct on the low-resolution ePaper screen.

Leveraging Global IoT Infrastructure

MePaper 2.0 is more than just a toy; it is a demonstration of how enterprise IoT features can be used for creative applications. The project utilizes several core platform features:

• REST API – The web app uses the Golioth management REST API to upload completed meme files as artifacts from the web backend built for creating/viewing memes
• Device Settings – To avoid the inefficiency of using the full firmware update system for every image, the team uses device settings. This allows them to push specific image versions to the entire fleet or target specific individuals and groups.
• Asset storage – In addition to firmware images that are delivered to the fleet of devices as Over-The-Air firmware updates, the formatted images (in PBM format) are stored as assets on the Golioth platform and then referenced with settings, mentioned above.
• Golioth Pipelines – The four buttons on the MagTag were turned into a gamified voting system. When a user receives a meme, they can press a button to rate it. This sends an integer through a pipeline to a real-time leaderboard on the web gallery, fostering a sense of competition among the “memers” in the company.

Seamless Setup and Security

Security is important at Golioth. But traditionally (and not just at Golioth), the most secure methods didn’t translate to IoT very well due to overhead and processing power. So we put improved Golioth workflows around certificates and some existing Espressif tooling to improve the process.

Dylan leaned on esptool-js, which allows communication to the device using Web Serial. The vibe coded front-end interacts directly with the device and prompts the user for all the steps they need to get the device online. First there is an erase cycle for the device’s flash memory. Then an installation initiates using a standard device firmware image and a device certificate that is provisioned for each user. Since it’s a closed system only available to Golioth employees, we provision a device certificate onto the same project and pair it up with the latest firmware at a memory offset (the cert is stored in a LittleFS partition). Once that bundle of device firmware and certificate is installed into the device, the user can directly configure Wi-Fi credentials without ever opening a terminal or a command-line tool. This ensures that the “Internet of Memes” remains secure while remaining easy for non-technical staff to deploy.

Dogfooding Golioth features, even during the holidays

Sometimes the best way to check in on a platform that we have been building for 5 years is to put it to the test; we created a facsimile of a connected product that our customers might build (with some obvious silly vibes mixed in). MePaper 2.0 represents the company’s commitment to “Demo Culture“. That is, the idea of testing products in real-world scenarios to identify pain points, find creative solutions, and share with coworkers. By turning the MagTag into a dedicated social terminal, the team has created a way to share joy and maintain a cohesive culture in a fully remote environment. It serves as a reminder that even the most advanced IoT infrastructure can be used to build something as simple and human as a shared laugh.