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.
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.
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.
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.
