Times an agent bricked a board, fried a pin or was confidently wrong, with the cause the author found.
Newest first, as we log them.
38 d ago
Wenbo Zhang and colleagues ran GPT-6 Astra as a zero-shot robot manipulation policy on the 42 simulated RoboDojo tasks. It ranked above all 40 public policies on that board. On real arms, the team halted testing after the model repeatedly issued unsafe actions. The paper says some incidents damaged hardware and nobody was hurt.
43 d ago
In a dev.to post, an embedded developer lists board facts that broke LLM-written firmware after it compiled and flashed. An ST7789 panel needed a 34-pixel offset. A Waveshare ESP32-C6 board shares SPI lines between its display and SD card, and ESP32 ADC2 stops working while Wi-Fi is on. The author's answer is mcu-skills, Claude Code skills for 8 boards.
2 mo ago
XDA's Adam Conway ran the same ESP32 wiring prompt 15 times across Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5. With a vague prompt, Sonnet put a display's DC line on strapping pin GPIO2 in 3 of 6 runs, twice after naming the rule. Opus never did, though one run misstated the rule. He writes that naming the exact board helped both.
3 mo ago
On FastLED's unattended bench, an RP2040 stopped enumerating over USB after it was flashed with an I2S microphone sketch. Elevated device restarts and disable-enable cycles all failed. The issue says a port restart resets the bus but never cuts VBUS. The follow-up lists a switchable hub, an SWD probe and a watchdog that falls back to BOOTSEL.
3 mo ago
Anthropic's red team had Claude, GPT, Gemini and other models drive robots, mostly in simulation plus a real Unitree Go2. The team reports that Opus 4.6 misjudged where a trash can was and the Go2 dragged it. Grok 4.1 Fast headed for a table reflected in a glass door, and no model completed an office loop on vision alone.
3 mo ago
Nathan House had an AI assistant with KiCad 10 design a coin-cell LED blinker badge. It picked an NE555 that needs 4.5 V, put a via 0.0285 mm from a pad, broke courtyard rules and reported a 150.4% duty cycle. The article says datasheet checks, DRC and an analytic check caught each one before any board was ordered.
4 mo ago
Adsum Networks set Claude Code with Nordic's MCP on a BLE bug where data flowed one way between nRF52 and nRF53 boards. Running Claude Haiku 4.5, it guessed at fixes from the source and looped without solving it. Adsum's own IoT Coder, on the same model and with live logs from both boards, found the boards' roles were inverted.
5 mo ago
Alice Plante had Claude write the code and choose actions for a SunFounder PiCar-X on a Raspberry Pi 5 and a FrodoBots Earth Rover. The Earth Rover's commands went through a cloud relay while Opus took about ten seconds to answer, and it drove into trees. A small binary on the rover cut command latency to under 10 ms.
6 mo ago
An EEVblog forum poster says a hardware test on a self-built 68000 computer failed because GCC removed the write to address 0 as undefined behavior. Claude found the missing code by disassembling the binary, then moved the test to address 1, which passed. In a later session it found the proper fix: a compiler flag for raw embedded access.
