Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I’ve been using OrbStack for that, you can attach any USB device to a container.by mococa
- It's annoying enough if "small" projects can't refuse to use LLMs to write their documentation, but large companies? There's really no excuse to use LLM garbage to write stuff intended for human consumption.
Do better.
by mschuster91 - This seems the natural evolution of what used to be:
1. A laptop with the development environment (DOS or Windows) kept in a box to use for updates / fixes
2. A VM on a NAS to use when a firmware in maintenance needs a fix
With more embedded tooling available on Linux, a docker image becames a natural choice.
by pietrofmaggi - - stupid question on a slightly unrelated note
- can someone with expertise in docker tell me why this guy is using isolate on top of docker to run untrusted user code? https://github.com/engineer-man/piston/blob/master/api/src/j...
by vivzkestrel - I tried this a while back and found it ended up being easier to just give the firmware agent a dedicated machine, there’s so much low-level stuff you want access to for iterating on firmware, and the docker layers kept confusing the agents when they were debugging faults, crashes, brownouts etc.
Combining a dedicated small machine with a USB hub that supports per-port power cycling lets the agent iterate and un-wedge stuff with no human intervention for very long (days) periods. Obviously any software produced that way is unusable, but it’s incredible for debugging. Agent gets a programmable oscilloscope, power-cycling, and peripherals (also power-cycleable) emulating the various things our product talks to in the wild.
TL;DR I found the docker layers just caused confusion for the agent and giving her an old laptop was way simpler and much more powerful
by jakewins - Seems a bit over bloated?
We're using Rust with embassy on the esp platform and its quite wonderful.
We have all peripheral modules isolated and have non-peripheral modules compatible with an embassy desktop scheduler and mock peripherals.
Harnesses are good enough now that you can get them in a loop with the actual hardware.
The next step is to hookup a Saleae and have the agent test against actual signals.
by kooi - We recently added ESP32-C5/C6 support with WiFi to espressif QEMU. Having ability to spin up virtual machines speeds up development quite a bit. We can now take our production firmware image, and run it unmodified on QEMU. No more waiting for boards to flash, spinning up multiple boards instantly. https://github.com/CognitiveSystemsCorp/qemu_espby mzakharo1