Evil-M5Project — Hardware, Version Map, and Operating Notes

Evil-M5Project is built around one vendor’s ESP32 product family, which makes its hardware story short and specific. This volume lists the supported devices and their per-device build names, gives an honest snapshot of the version numbers those builds carried during 2025–2026, and records the practical constraints an operator meets on this class of hardware.

4.1 Supported devices

The upstream project publishes a per-device build for each supported M5Stack device. The Cardputer build is the reference: it has the most features, gets them first, and its QWERTY keyboard makes the interactive tools usable. Broadly:

M5Cardputer — the recommended and most complete platform (Evil-Cardputer).
M5Stack Core2 — the device the project was first built for (Evil-M5Core2).
M5Stack CoreS3 / CoreS3 SE — S3-silicon core units (Evil-M5Core3).
M5Stack Core (Fire / Basic / AWS) and Core1-class — older core units, supported with a reduced feature set.
M5AtomS3 — a very small unit; supported, and paired with a GPS module for wardriving, but with a limited menu owing to its tiny screen and single button.
M5StickC (v1.1 / v2) and CYD-class boards — supported in beta form.

The single most important hardware fact repeats the correction recorded in Volume 1: the M5Stack Cardputer Zero is not a target. Despite the family name, the confirmed product is a Raspberry Pi CM0 Linux handheld, not an ESP32 device, and Evil-M5Project is ESP32-only firmware.

4.2 Version map (2025–2026 snapshot)

The per-device builds advance on independent version numbers, so there is no single “Evil-M5Project version.” The values below are the numbers the builds carried in the M5Burner catalogue and the repository during 2025–2026, recorded here so the page ages honestly rather than implying they are current:

Table 1 — here so the page ages honestly rather than implying they are current

Build	Target device	Version (2025–2026 snapshot)
Evil-Cardputer	M5Cardputer	1.5.5
Evil-M5Core2	M5Stack Core2	1.5.1
Evil-M5Core3	M5Stack CoreS3 / SE	1.1.9
Evil-AtomS3	M5AtomS3	1.1.7
Evil-Face	(companion build)	1.0

These numbers will have moved on. The takeaway is structural, not numeric: the Cardputer build leads, the core builds trail it, and the small-device builds trail further — so a feature described from the Cardputer build may not yet exist on an AtomS3 at the same date.

4.3 Hardware requirements and accessories

microSD card — effectively mandatory (FAT32, 16 GB or smaller recommended). It holds the UI assets, captive-portal pages, logs, and configuration, as detailed in Volume 3.
GPS module — required for wardriving and for GPS-tagged output; the AtomS3 wardriving setup in particular depends on an attached GPS unit.
Battery — the core and stick devices carry their own cells; run time is short under continuous transmit, and the Cardputer’s small internal cell in particular benefits from an external pack for extended sessions.

4.4 Operating constraints

Single 2.4 GHz radio. Like all classic-ESP32 tooling, the device scans channels by time-slicing a single radio; it cannot watch all channels at once. The upstream coordinator/worker mode (Volume 2) exists specifically to spread channels across several boards.
No 5 GHz. The supported silicon is 2.4 GHz only.
Transmit features may be gated. As with the wider ESP32 firmware family, the deauth transmit path depends on a patched Wi-Fi library; a build made without the preparatory step may ship with that feature missing.
BLE-spam effectiveness is a moving target. The various BLE advertisement payloads work against some phone operating systems and not others, and vendor patches change this over time. Treat any specific “it pops up on iOS/Android” claim as version-dependent and verify on the bench.
Thermals and power. Continuous transmit on a small board in a plastic case warms it up; long captures are more reliable with the device on external power.

4.5 Bench notes and photography

The images that would most improve this dive are of the owner’s own hardware in use. The following slots are reserved for bench photographs only the owner can take:

Hack Tools → the M5 devices in the Volume 1 “runs on” matrix.