Hey HN - We’re Bob and Ethan from Embedder (https://embedder.dev), a hardware-aware AI coding agent that can write firmware and test it on physical hardware.

Here’s a demo in which we integrate a magnetometer for the Pebble 2 Duo smartwatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOpAfeiFQkQ

We were frustrated by the gap between coding agents and the realities of writing firmware. We'd ask Cursor to, say, write an I2C driver for a new sensor on an STM32, and it would confidently spit out code that used non-existent registers or HAL functions from the wrong chip family. It had no context, so it would just guess and the code is always wrong.

Even when it wrote the right code, the agent had no way of interacting with your board and the developer would have to manually test it and prompt the agent again to fix any bugs they found. Making current solutions not ideal when working in an embedded context.

That’s why we are building Embedder, a hardware-aware coding agent that is optimized for work in embedded contexts. It understands your datasheets and schematics and can also flash and test on your hardware.

First, you give it context by uploading datasheets, reference manuals, schematics, or any other documentation on our web console and our coding agent will automatically have context when it executes tasks in the command line.

Second, Embedder can directly interact with your hardware to close the development loop. The agent is able to use a serial console just like a regular developer to read from your board and verify outputs. To solve more complex bugs or identify hardware issues the coding agent is also able to launch a debugging agent optimized for step through debugging workloads and interact with local or remote gbdservers.

You can try it out today. It’s an npm package you can install and run from your terminal:

  npm i -g @embedder/embedder && embedder

It's free for the rest of this month while we're in beta. After that, we're planning a usage based model for individual developers and a team plan with more advanced features.

We’d love to get feedback from the community, or hear about your experiences of embedded development. We’ll be in the comments to respond!

Submissions

Launch HN: Embedder (YC S25) – Claude code for embedded software