Hilstart

Hardware teams doing board bring-up, firmware development, and validation today rely on engineers manually wiring up scopes, logic analyzers, power supplies, and meters, then babysitting the bench while tests run. Writing test plans, driving instruments, and correlating results against firmware builds is manual and repetitive work that ties up engineering time. The page addresses teams 'if your agents write firmware while your engineers still babysit the bench,' implying this manual supervision is the core pain they are targeting.

Hilstart reads schematics, PCB layout, netlist, BoM, I/O summary, and requirements (including direct KiCad and Altium import) into a single approved specification that becomes the source of truth for all testing. Its agent then drafts hardware test plans grounded in that spec, which engineers review, edit thresholds on, and approve before anything touches real hardware. Once approved, Tracer, a hardware interface with analog I/O, programmable power (0-48V at 3A), digital GPIO, isolated I/O, and CAN FD/SPI/I2C/UART buses, runs tests autonomously on real hardware, alongside connected USB and LAN instruments, with reports linked to the exact test scripts, firmware build, and pushed into the user's tracker via API. Reading instruments is always permitted, but any action that drives an output (power supply, DAC) requires explicit approval in the test plan. Teams can work in a browser-based Sandbox with the environment pre-configured, or reach the same hardware layer from their own environment via API.