Overview
A firmware bug is a four-way join across the code, the chip, the schematic, and whatever the board is doing at this exact moment. Most generic AI tools only ever see one of those at a time. Embedder treats debugging as a first-class workflow: it holds all four together and drives the test equipment itself to find the line that's actually wrong, not the line that merely looks wrong.
Why firmware RCA is hard
Software root-cause analysis usually bottoms out at a stack trace and a logical bug. Firmware RCA can bottom out somewhere far less convenient: a timing violation, an undocumented MCU errata, two peripherals racing each other, a missing pull-up, an electrical fault that shows up only under load. The symptom lives in the code. The root cause frequently doesn't, and you won't find it unless you can see every layer at once.
What Embedder ingests
- Serial output. Boot logs, application traces, and hard-fault dumps through the integrated terminal.
- GDB state. Registers, memory, stack frames, and breakpoints over J-Link, ST-Link, or OpenOCD.
- Core dumps. Post-mortem analysis, with the agent walking the call stacks for you.
- Logic analyzer captures. Saleae and Digilent natively, plus exported files from anything else, so you see what the bus actually said rather than what the driver assumed.
- Power traces. Nordic PPK and Joulescope, to catch unexpected wake events, current spikes, and sleep-mode bugs.
- Bench instruments. Siglent and Rigol scope captures for the analog problems.
- The codebase, schematic, datasheet, and errata, joined to everything above.
Autonomous instrument control
Embedder doesn't stop at reading captures; it connects to the bench and drives it. It controls GDB, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and power profilers in parallel, setting breakpoints, arming triggers, and lining up a current spike against a bus transaction against a register read in one pass. The whole loop runs end to end with nobody at the keyboard. The agent forms a hypothesis, configures the instruments to test it, reads the result, and decides what to try next. When one approach comes back inconclusive it reaches for another, chasing several lines of attack at once rather than waiting on a person to rewire and rerun. Those tracks run concurrently under a single orchestrator.
Debugging that compounds
Every investigation is scripted. Because the agent debugs by writing and running scripts against your hardware, each step is reproducible and the next attempt picks up where the last one stopped. Those scripts and findings accumulate into a project-specific library: the probe setups, the trigger conditions, the known failure modes for your particular board. The second bug of a given class lands faster than the first, and a new engineer inherits all of it instead of rebuilding it from scratch.
Workflow
- Paste a fault, log, or failing test, or point the agent at a board showing the issue.
- The agent reproduces it on the connected board or replays a recorded capture.
- It narrows scope across code, datasheet, errata, schematic, and live board state.
- It proposes a root cause with evidence (“the I²C bus is hung because peripheral X holds SDA low after a clock stretch the driver doesn't handle, datasheet §17.3.2, errata note 4”) and a candidate fix.
- You review and accept, and the fix lands as a PR with the trace and citations attached.
Field bugs and customer reproductions
The worst bugs are the ones that only ever happen on a customer's unit. When a customer ships back a log or the unit itself, the agent replays the sequence against a board in your lab and works backwards from the symptom to the cause with whatever instruments happen to be wired up. Sessions attach to support tickets, so the next engineer who inherits the ticket doesn't start from zero.
Hallucination detection
Debugging earns its place as a flagship workflow because it's where generic AI fails most expensively. A wrong register write at code-generation time costs you an hour. A wrong root-cause hypothesis halfway through a field-failure investigation costs a week, maybe a recall. So Embedder grounds every claim in evidence it can put in front of you, the datasheet section, the bus capture, the GDB register dump. When it has no evidence, it tells you so rather than guessing.
Who it's for
- Teams shipping firmware to customers, where every saved field debug compounds.
- Senior firmware engineers who carry the hard-bug load and would rather not.
- Regulated programs that need audit-trail RCA reports tied back to source documentation.
Getting started
Bring your worst open bug. We'll show you what the agent does with it. Talk to an engineer.