About ยท who runs this and how it works
About Boards & Bots
Boards & Bots is a directory of AI agents doing hardware work: flashing firmware, bringing up boards, running hardware-in-the-loop tests, driving robots, reviewing PCBs and operating lab instruments. We look for new tools, builds and fails every day, and every entry says how sure we are that it works.
What this is
AI coding agents went from writing web apps to flashing microcontrollers and driving oscilloscopes in about a year. The work is spread across GitHub, Hacker News, blogs, videos and social posts. This site collects it in one place, sorted by what you have on your bench: board, instrument, agent and interface.
An entry has to show an AI agent building, testing or operating hardware, or be a tool an agent uses to do that. If no hardware is involved, it does not belong here, however good it is.
Entries come in six kinds:
- Tools
- Repos, MCP servers, CLIs and libraries that connect an AI agent to boards and bench gear.
- Builds
- Boards, robots and rigs that people built or fixed with an agent.
- Magic Smoke
- Times an agent bricked a board, fried a pin or was confidently wrong, with the cause the author found.
- Guides
- How-tos and workflows for putting an agent to work on your bench.
- News
- Launches, releases, funding and papers about agents doing hardware work.
- Discussions
- Questions, show-and-tell and conversations started by members.
The crew
Each kind of entry has its own robot on the night shift, and it appears next to that kind's name across the site. Boots is the site's own robot and runs The Boot Log. Scout, the rover, helps out.
- ProbeTools botProbe probes each new tool on a real chip.
- IronBuilds botIron solders in the builds people made.
- SmokeMagic Smoke botSmoke stands by when the agent lets the smoke out.
- ReaderGuides botReader reads the guides and how-tos.
- MastNews botMast listens for launches, funding and papers.
- PatchDiscussions botPatch keeps the line open for member threads.
- BootsThe site's robotBoots runs The Boot Log and is our logo.
- ScoutThe roverScout drives off whenever nobody is looking.
Who runs it
Boards & Bots is run by Dustin Brazeau, an embedded and firmware engineer, under Headwind Studios. He reviews the entries the curator is unsure about, picks the Build of the Week and approves every sponsor.
To correct or remove an entry about your work, see takedown requests. To sponsor a week, see sponsor a week.
How entries are found
- The collector checks public sources every six hours for posts and repos that mention both an AI agent and hardware, and keeps the ones that score high enough. What it reads.
- Date-range scans run the same source code over past weeks and months, to fill in work we would otherwise have missed.
- Members will be able to submit links and write posts once submissions open. What you can submit.
- Reading by hand. Some places, X and Reddit among them, are not collected automatically. Links from there arrive through members and our own research.
How entries are checked
The curator is an AI agent. It reads each source, decides whether it fits, and writes the title, a 40 to 60 word summary and the tags. It writes every entry with AI and checks it against the source: a summary describes what the source shows and adds nothing the source does not say.
When the curator is confident, the entry publishes. When it is unsure, the entry waits for Dustin to review it. Anything connected to us always waits for a person.
Every entry carries one of three levels: Verified on our bench, Shown working or Claimed. How we check and what each level needs.
Summaries are our own words. We quote a source only in quotation marks, at most 25 words, with credit, and we always link the original and credit its author. When someone shows us an entry is wrong, we fix it and add a short "Updated" note to the entry.
Our own projects
Dustin also builds hardware tools: hil-kit, an open-source hardware-in-the-loop test kit, and BenchHand, a small USB box that connects developers and AI agents to a dev board's console, debug probe, power and buttons. They may appear here, so anything we make, sell, are paid by or have a stake in:
- carries a visible "From the Boards & Bots team" or "Sponsored" label,
- always goes through human review, never straight to the site,
- gets no ranking boost beyond what any other entry gets.
Sponsors pay for the sponsor slot only. They never buy entries, rankings or reviews. How sponsorship works.
The collector
If you found this page through a request in your logs: that was our collector, a small program that asks public APIs for new posts and repositories about AI agents and hardware. It identifies itself with this User-Agent:
BoardsAndBotsCollector/0.1 (+https://boardsandbots.com/about#collector)What it reads
Only documented public APIs and feeds, within their published limits and terms:
- GitHub repository search
- The public REST search API. Repositories pushed in the last 30 days that match our queries; forks and archived repos are skipped.
- Hacker News
- The Algolia search API for Hacker News. Stories from the last two days with at least two points; we keep the linked page, not the discussion.
- arXiv
- The arXiv API. Papers submitted in the last week, one request every three seconds as arXiv asks.
- dev.to
- The Forem API that dev.to runs on. Recent posts under hardware and agent tags, at most one request a second.
- npm registry
- The registry's public search. Packages published in the last 30 days with matching keywords.
- RSS and Atom feeds
- Feeds from Hackaday, Hackster, CNX Software, Adafruit, Embedded.com and Memfault's Interrupt blog.
- Hackaday
- The WordPress REST API that Hackaday's site serves publicly, for searching past articles by date. Used only when we scan older date ranges, at most one request a second.
What it does not read
- Reddit is not collected automatically. Its free Data API tier is for non-commercial use, and this site has sponsors.
- X is not collected automatically because of what its API costs. Posts from X appear only when a member or we add them, shown with X's own embed.
- YouTube and Bluesky are planned. They will be listed above when the collector reads them.
What it keeps
Titles, short snippets (at most 300 characters) and metadata such as dates, authors and star counts. Never full articles or posts. It runs every six hours, spaces its requests, and backs off when a server asks it to.
If it is doing something on your site that you do not want, email takedown@boardsandbots.com and we will stop.