A series of embedded development sessions — hardware detection, firmware, and real working code, all through conversation.
I want to tell you about something remarkable I experienced — a complete embedded development session with Claude, Anthropic's AI, that genuinely blew me away.
I sat down with a brand-new Freenove ESP32-S3 development kit — a proper little beast of a board with a 240 MHz dual-core processor, a 2.8" touchscreen, stereo speakers, a camera, and a heart rate sensor. I'd never used this exact board before, and I wanted to go from "just unboxed" to "running custom firmware" with Claude doing the heavy lifting.
What followed was one of the most impressive things I've seen an AI do. Claude detected the hardware over USB, identified the WCH serial driver, set up a Python virtual environment, read the actual firmware off the chip using esptool.py, wrote a full backup and restore script, then — after researching the exact GPIO pin assignments from Freenove's own GitHub repo — wrote a complete Arduino sketch that drives the LCD, reads touch input, and plays audio over I2S.
If you're doing any ESP32 work, Dave — Claude is the real deal. It's not hand-wavy "here's some code that might work." It reads the actual schematics, uses the real GPIO numbers, iterates on real compiler errors, and ships working firmware.