The week on the bench · Monday to Sunday, UTC
Week 28, 2026 · 6 to 12 July
11 entries published: 4 tools, 2 builds, 1 Magic Smoke, 3 guides, 1 news. This page lists what was published; it is not a newsletter issue.
The week as a scope trace
One channel per kind, one pulse per entry at the hour it was published. Taller pulses have more points.
Build of the week · BB-0120
Claude Code agents build a tilt maze game on a PIC24 Curiosity board and debug its I2C driver
Ori Grossman built a tilt maze game on a PIC24FJ256GA705 Curiosity board with Claude Code agents, an ADXL345 accelerometer and a 96x96 OLED. One agent drove the board's debugger through MPLAB's mdb command line and traced an I2C driver bug that dropped queued bytes. The README has a photo of the game running.
Tools4
All tools3 mo ago
FTC Toolchain: an MCP server to build, deploy and debug FIRST Tech Challenge robot code
FTC Toolchain gives coding agents 35 MCP tools for building and deploying FIRST Tech Challenge robot code. It searches FTC SDK samples and Pedro Pathing docs, scaffolds OpModes, builds TeamCode with Gradle, deploys to a REV Control Hub and reads robot logs. It installs with npx; the README calls its npm tests a smoke test that needs no robot.
Claimed3 mo ago
Silico: a framework for agents to build and maintain firmware for a real device
In Silico, coding agents write and maintain a device's firmware from a spec kept in a GitHub repo. The agent scaffolds firmware, a simulator with its own HAL, an install tool and CI that runs on the simulator and on hardware. MicroPython is the default, with C on ESP-IDF as an option. Three demo specs target an M5Stack M5GO kit.
Claimed3 mo ago
McuBuddy: an MCP server for MCU debugging through ST-Link, J-Link and Keil
McuBuddy connects AI assistants to MCU debug probes such as ST-Link and J-Link for board-level debugging. Opt-in toolsets add Keil MDK builds, SVD register decoding, RTT and UART logs, FreeRTOS task state and flash writes. Each result says what kind of failure it found and suggests the next safe check. The README lists validation on STM32L496 and STM32F103 boards.
Claimed3 mo ago
Agentic HIL: an MCP server that flashes and tests on real boards
Agentic HIL exposes MCP tools that flash a board through OpenOCD, pyOCD or STM32CubeProgrammer and drive it over UART and CAN. Each action is checked against one bench configuration kept outside the repository, and a pytest plugin runs the same gate in CI. Hannes Pauli's worked example targets an ST Nucleo-F446RE. We have not seen run logs.
Claimed
Builds2
All builds3 mo ago
Claude Code agents build a tilt maze game on a PIC24 Curiosity board and debug its I2C driver
Ori Grossman built a tilt maze game on a PIC24FJ256GA705 Curiosity board with Claude Code agents, an ADXL345 accelerometer and a 96x96 OLED. One agent drove the board's debugger through MPLAB's mdb command line and traced an I2C driver bug that dropped queued bytes. The README has a photo of the game running.
Shown working3 mo ago
StackChan Remote MCP: Codex controls a CoreS3 robot's face, camera and touch
StackChan Remote MCP connects Codex to an M5Stack CoreS3 StackChan robot through a FastMCP server and an MQTT broker on a VPS. Codex switches the robot's expression, gets camera photos back as MCP images and reads screen and head-pad touches from an unread queue. The README reports an end-to-end test on a CoreS3 but shows no photos or logs.
Claimed
Magic Smoke1
All Magic Smoke3 mo ago
Claude plays robotics: a Go2 walks into a trash can and no model completes the office loop
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.
Claimed
Guides3
All guides3 mo ago
Claude Code guides for building RepRapFirmware and an ESP32 NFC filament sensor
RRF_Claude collects plain-English guides for non-programmers doing hardware work with Claude Code. One compiles RepRapFirmware for Duet3D printer boards on Windows or macOS and adds features to it. Another wires two PN5180 NFC readers to an ESP32 while the agent writes firmware for Bambu Lab and OpenPrintTag spool tags. The repo shows no photos or build results.
Claimed3 mo ago
Using Claude Code to port and verify FPGA designs on real boards
The FPGA Developer blog describes giving Claude Code control of programming, UART and power cycling on an AMD FPGA bench. In the post's example, the agent ports a reference design to a new dev board, then tests and fixes it there. The author says such ports take a few hours. The post also covers token use and hooks.
Claimed3 mo ago
JetsonHacks: Claude Code on a Jetson AGX Orin programs a headless Orin Nano with NVIDIA skills
JetsonHacks shows Claude Code on a Jetson AGX Orin programming a headless Jetson Orin Nano over SSH. The 13-minute video sets up VS Code and Claude Code, then installs NVIDIA's Jetson Device Skills, agent instructions and scripts for diagnostics, memory tuning, LLM serving and video work on a live Jetson. The skills also work with Codex and Cursor.
Shown working
News1
All news3 mo ago
UST and Anthropic alliance puts Claude Code into UST-iDEC silicon validation
UST announced an alliance with Anthropic that puts Claude into the engineering platforms UST runs for clients. In UST-iDEC, its hardware and silicon validation platform, Claude Code reads chip pinouts and schematics, then writes and runs regression test scripts that engineers used to write by hand. UST says the platform already cuts validation cycles by 50 to 70%.
Claimed