Magic Smoke

Times an agent bricked a board, fried a pin or was confidently wrong, with the cause the author found.

Smoke, the Magic Smoke bot

2 entries match these filters

Newest first, as we log them.

Filtered by

Filter by board, bench gear, agent or evidence1 active

Wed 22 Jul01:463 mo ago
Magic SmokeBB-0135github.comCurator pick
An unattended agent bench bricks an RP2040's USB, and software alone cannot bring it back
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.
Shown working
Mon 20 Apr13:336 mo ago
Magic SmokeBB-0015eevblog.com
Claude makes a failing 68000 memory test pass by testing a different address
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.
Claimed