Agent
Agents people built themselves, with frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI or AutoGen or from scratch, to do one hardware job well.
The most active tools first.
2 mo ago
Velxio simulates more than 30 boards in the browser, ten of them ESP32 variants emulated in QEMU. Its AI agent, on paid plans, wires parts on the canvas, writes the firmware, compiles it and reads the serial monitor. All of it is simulation; creator David Montero Crespo writes that the build is the binary you would flash.
2 mo ago
Firment is a Rust coding agent for firmware that builds with the project's own toolchain and flashes and debugs over probe-rs. The README ranks evidence: a photo of a lit LED or a logic-analyzer capture outranks the model's word. A red-team mode fuzzes the UART of firmware the agent wrote. The README shows client screenshots, no hardware run.
5 mo ago
QClaw runs a Qwen3.5 0.8B model and a Go agent loop on the Linux side of an Arduino UNO Q board. Its 8 tools include camera capture, I2C scans and sketch compiles that OpenOCD flashes to the board's MCU over SWD. David Laurenvil says it scrolls text across the LED matrix offline; we have not seen photos or logs.
5 mo ago
Edge Agents, from ForestHub, runs AI agent workflows offline on Linux edge boards in a container of about 30 MB. Workflows mix GPIO, ADC, PWM, UART and MQTT nodes with local small language models or cloud LLMs. The README says 5 boards, including a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Jetson Orin Nano, were exercised on the authors' bench.
Ranked by points weighed against age. New entries with early votes rise.
2 mo ago
Iluvatar Labs had its research agent, Marvin, route AgentPad13, a two-layer RP2040 macropad modeled on OpenAI's Codex Micro. Marvin reached zero unrouted connections and zero DRC errors; FreeRouting and Quilter had left 18 and 19 unrouted. It also built and simulated the QMK firmware. Photos show the lit prototype.
2 mo ago
Adsum Networks' IoT Coder agent debugged a Fanstel BWG840 gateway whose nRF52840 BLE scanner ran cleanly but received nothing. It flashed an nRF52840 dongle as a Bluetooth sniffer and compared the air with RTT logs: 36 advertisements captured, none received. The cause was an RF front-end that was never enabled. This is a vendor demo of its own product.
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.
45 d ago
Asraful Haque and colleagues released an open-source toolkit for agent-driven RHEED (reflection high-energy electron diffraction) on a pulsed laser deposition system. It adds programmable electron-optics control, automatic beam alignment and rocking-curve capture, with analysis served over MCP. The paper describes a demo driven by natural-language requests. We found no code link.
49 d ago
SEGGER and Embedder announced on 10 September that Embedder's firmware agent can now drive J-Link and J-Trace debug probes. The announcement says the agent loads builds, sets breakpoints, reads registers and memory and watches RTT output, then keeps debugging on the target until the code works. It gives no availability date or price.
51 d ago
Copperhead launched on Hacker News as an agentic circuit-board design tool that compiles designs to KiCad files and manufacturing outputs. The founder writes that it works on its own hardware representation instead of editing KiCad directly. The thread drew 250 points. No board made with Copperhead was shown, and assembled-board ordering is still planned.
55 d ago
Jesse Lawrence, new to hardware, used plain-English prompts in Axiometa Studio to generate firmware for the Axiometa Genesis Mini starter kit and flash it. Studio is the vendor's browser tool. The 10-minute video keeps the unboxing and his fumbling, and ends with a simple reaction-time game running on the kit.
2 mo ago
Zahra Ayar, Georg Fantner and colleagues published a paper on three MCP-connected agents that run an atomic force microscope. One converts plain-language requests to checked commands, one judges image quality and retunes imaging, and one diagnoses artifacts. In live experiments, the paper says, the tuning agent did as well as expert operators. No code is linked.
2 mo ago
Edison Science Corner built a Wi-Fi camera rover on a Seeed XIAO ESP32S3 Sense with an L293D motor driver without writing code. Seeed's CodeCraft assistant generated the firmware and wiring instructions and flashed the board from the browser. The 5-minute video shows assembly, the 3D-printed chassis, live streaming and joystick control. Its description carries Seeed affiliate links.
3 mo ago
FWAuto's 3.6-minute video runs its own firmware agent through an STM32 edge-AI job on an STM32F4DISCOVERY board. The agent checks the toolchain, integrates an existing NanoEdge AI library, and builds and flashes over ST-LINK. From 02:52 it verifies gestures on the board and writes an evidence report. Model training is outside the demo's scope.
3 mo ago
Cadence announced the AuraStack AI Super Agent, an agentic platform in Allegro AI Studio for PCB and advanced packaging design. It coordinates domain agents from system planning through place and route, manufacturability checks and multiphysics signoff, on the same architecture as Cadence's ChipStack agent. Cadence says it will be available in 2026 and cites 2X faster time to market.
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
Researchers put an LLM agent in charge of a trapped-ion experiment's ARTIQ control code through an MCP server. Every tool call needs a token bound to its contents, issued by a human or after a simulated run stays within device limits. The paper reports that the agent built a calibration stack and, with operator guidance, closed a magnetic-field stabilization loop.
5 mo ago
Root Access, a US maker of electronics for drones and robots, opened its Seb coding agent to the public on 8 May. In a Show HN post, founding engineer Vignesh K, a former TI applications engineer, says Seb reads schematics, datasheets and BOMs, mixes deterministic algorithms with LLM calls and connects to debuggers and logs. We saw no demo.
5 mo ago
Chunhui Li and Wei Fan describe RFIA, an RF instrument agent whose LLM plans while a deterministic runtime operates the instrument. A knowledge base supplies verified skills, workflow templates and SCPI command lookup. On a commercial vector network analyzer, the paper reports all 16 benchmark tasks handled with both MiniMax-M2.7 and Qwen3.6-27B, including 1 expected safety rejection.
5 mo ago
Tech-AD-venture's 65-minute video walks through wiring sensors to an ESP32 over I2C and UART and defining a JSON command protocol on the serial link. It then builds a FastAPI-based MCP server so an LLM called through the OpenAI API can read registers and send commands. We have not watched the full video to confirm the hardware segments.
5 mo ago
Penglin Dai and co-authors describe AutoMCU, an LLM multi-agent system that designs neural networks to fit a microcontroller's RAM and flash limits. Vendor toolchain checks reject candidates that would not fit before any training. The paper reports competitive CIFAR accuracy after 1 to 2 hours of customization and tests on several STM32 parts; no code is linked.
5 mo ago
Craig Schindler, CTO of Assemble Labs, describes how the company has AI agents write experiments for embedded devices and interpret sensor and power data. The 10-minute interview was recorded at NVIDIA GTC 2026. His main case study is a wearable health sensor, including how power regressions are found and fixed. The video shows no bench footage of the agents.
7 mo ago
AllSpice published a paper on DRCY, a multi-agent LLM system that checks schematic connections pin by pin against component datasheets. It runs as a CI/CD action when an engineer submits a design review on AllSpice Hub and posts inline comments. A consensus agent reconciles repeated runs. The authors say it runs in production; the paper gives no accuracy figures.
6 mo ago
Seif Salama built an Ackermann-steered robot that runs one ROS 2 Humble stack in Gazebo Harmonic and on a Raspberry Pi car. A custom ros2_control interface drives the motors over UART and the steering servo over I2C. A Gemini or Ollama agent takes spoken commands. We could not tell whether the README video shows the physical robot.
