I think the novel idea here is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it.
The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation?
So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it.
You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but nonetheless this is not a thing you can ask of any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff can get interesting.
Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have a plethora of workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this particular software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.
It's lower level than that. "It will probe the approved targets and report back." It has enough smarts to find the pins, and maybe it can read the text labels on some ICs, but that's about it. That eliminates much drudgery, though. And probably the job of some tech who did that by hand.
But there is no good reason you can't do that already. Hardware engineers have just been fundamentally unserious about computer use going on 20 years. The PCB design you could do in 2000 already, but now it's still PDF datasheets, people drawing footprints and connecting RX lines to RX lines.
I gotta give the hardware team credit for programmable pins on μc though. It means you just need to bring the pins out to pads and do whatever, instead of each pin has a fixed function so pin 14 MUST go to the next thing. (Within reason; vcc and gnd can't move).
The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation?
So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it.
You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but nonetheless this is not a thing you can ask of any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff can get interesting.
Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have a plethora of workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this particular software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.