#021: Hardware at Software Speed: How BootLoop Is Bringing AI to the Bench for Firmware Teams

Coredump Sessions · 25 Mar 2026 · 1h 01m · Episode 22

AI in practice: 3 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Noah Pasek-Nelson and Chris Markus, co-founders of BootLoop, explain how their AI platform accelerates the firmware lifecycle by combining deep hardware context with automated hardware-in-the-loop testing. They discuss how ingesting schematics and data sheets eliminates hallucinations, allowing the system to generate, flash, and validate code on physical devices like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. The founders also cover BootLoop's security posture, pricing model, and its 'Sentinel' product for automated field debugging.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationBootLoop

The AI platform ingests Altium and KiCad schematics to automatically extract firmware-oriented netlists, register maps, and pin configurations, grounding code generation in specific hardware context to reduce hallucinations.

“upload an Altium project, a KiCad project. And what we do is we automatically extract, think of it as kind of a firmware oriented net list. Right? So we're pulling out the chips, how they're connected … We also care a lot about the signals and how they're routed … pulling out things like register maps, pinmarks tables…”

Speaker 2 · Hear it at 9:05

Engineering & simulationBootLoop

The AI agent automatically builds firmware using the user's toolchain, flashes it to a connected device, and iterates on the code without human intervention to verify functionality.

“it will actually go one step further and then go and test it on device. So if you have that hardware plugged into your computer, we'll automatically take the firmware, build it using your tool chain, and then we'll flash it to the device.”

Speaker 2 · Hear it at 10:23

Engineering & simulationBootLoop

The AI agent connects to power meters and iterates on firmware code to optimize power consumption, automatically finding configurations that meet specific low-power targets while maintaining functionality.

“connect a power meter, iterate over this until everything still works, but the power draws below like 10 microwatts, right? And you can just have that go, come back in a day, can be going on a remote hardware in the loop server. … here's your code with that lower power draw.”

Speaker 3 · Hear it at 12:48

Mentioned

Companies
Memfault, SpaceX, MIT Media Lab, Anthropic, OpenAI
Products
BootLoop, Sentinel, NRF Cloud, Gemini
Tools
Altium, KiCad, GDB, Zephyr, Yocto

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