The week on the bench · Monday to Sunday, UTC
Week 41, 2026 · 5 to 11 October
10 entries published: 4 tools, 2 builds, 1 guide, 3 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-0235
An AI agent on a Nokia 110 4G, built by reverse engineering its firmware with Codex
Anup Ray reverse-engineered a Nokia 110 4G's firmware with OpenAI Codex and rewrote its Calculator app as an agent chat app. It sends messages to DeepSeek over the phone's SIM data and can check the battery, toggle the torch, place calls and set alarms. It loads into RAM from a computer, so a restart removes it.
Tools4
All tools18 d ago
ESP32 iPhone Agent: a vision model operates a real iPhone through an ESP32-S3
ESP32 iPhone Agent runs on an ESP32-S3 that presents itself to an iPhone as an AirPlay receiver, a USB mouse and a USB keyboard. A vision model watches the mirrored screen and taps, swipes and types through AssistiveTouch on an unmodified phone. README photos show the board and phone setting a repeating alarm in the Clock app.
Shown working18 d ago
Tramuntana: an RP2350 bench tool with bus sniffers, scope and logic analyzer for agents
Tramuntana is an open bench tool built on the RP2350 (Raspberry Pi Pico 2) and Zephyr that works over one USB cable. It has SPI and I2C master and sniffer modes, a 2-channel 500 kS/s scope, a waveform generator, an 8-channel logic analyzer and a UART bridge. Its Python package adds an MCP server. The README shows no captures.
Claimed18 d ago
AWIC: browser, MCP and SCPI control for cheap USB scopes and logic analyzers
AWIC controls FX2-based USB logic analyzers and oscilloscopes that sigrok supports, from a Rust server with native USB drivers. Agents reach it through MCP, people through a web UI and scripts through an SCPI socket; it also switches USB hub port power. It runs on Linux and was built with Claude Code. The README says every feature works on hardware.
Claimed24 d ago
TraceMaker: a KiCad autorouter with agent skills and an MCP routing session
TraceMaker routes and places KiCad 9 and 10 boards and judges the result with KiCad's own design-rule check. Two agent skills prepare a board and sign off a route, and an experimental session mode exposes the router over MCP. The README reports 72.5% of PCBench tier B boards routed with no added KiCad errors, against 50% for Freerouting.
Claimed
Builds2
All builds21 d ago
An AI agent on a Nokia 110 4G, built by reverse engineering its firmware with Codex
Anup Ray reverse-engineered a Nokia 110 4G's firmware with OpenAI Codex and rewrote its Calculator app as an agent chat app. It sends messages to DeepSeek over the phone's SIM data and can check the battery, toggle the torch, place calls and set alarms. It loads into RAM from a computer, so a restart removes it.
Shown working21 d ago
ETH Zurich project has a language model set rehab robot parameters over MCP
Celal Türkmen's ETH Zurich semester project has a language model convert a therapist's plain-language request into an MCP tool call for a rehabilitation robot. A validator built from each device's YAML file of parameters, units and bounds decides whether the call reaches the hardware. The README reports runs on a Novint Falcon haptic device under ROS 2 Jazzy.
Claimed
Guides1
All guides18 d ago
Andreas Spiess: an agent takes ESP32 firmware from spec to passing tests on real boards
Andreas Spiess's 18-minute video shows Claude Code taking ESP32 firmware from a written specification to passing tests on a Raspberry Pi testbench. The agent writes and builds the firmware, flashes it to boards on the bench, runs tests over Wi-Fi, MQTT, BLE and RF, and fixes failures until the tests pass. The skills and testbench code are open source.
Shown working
News3
All news21 d ago
Nordic MCP adds PPK2 power profiling and J-Link debugging skills for AI assistants
In September Nordic Semiconductor added skills to its Nordic MCP server that drive a Power Profiler Kit II and SEGGER J-Link probes. The PPK2 skill captures long measurement runs and flags anomalies against a reference pattern; the debug skill runs GDB sessions. The nRF Connect extension for VS Code now shares build context. The post shows no runs.
Claimed21 d ago
Closed-loop benchmark tests LLM agents that build, check and fix embedded firmware
Jorge García-Carrasco and colleagues published a benchmark in the Journal of Systems Architecture that scores LLM coding agents on 5 embedded-control tasks. Agents must build firmware, verify it and iterate under 4 feedback levels, from one-shot to oracle-style hints. The paper reports 420 runs on simulated ESP32 firmware: GPT-5.4 passed most often, and Qwen3.5-27B was the strongest local model.
Claimed22 d ago
Silicon Labs opens a beta of its Simplicity AI SDK for agent-driven embedded work
Silicon Labs opened a public beta of its Simplicity AI SDK on 22 September, connecting AI coding assistants to its SDKs, tools and hardware. RFID Journal reports that GitHub Copilot and Codex are validated and that support starts with Bluetooth LE. A Hardware Intent Agent that drafts projects from board schematics is due in alpha in January 2027.
Claimed
