I didn't build this for AI. I built the instrument I kept wishing I had — and one day an agent reached for it on its own.
It started with a radio that wouldn't talk. I was bringing up an nRF24 board, and it just kept failing. So every time, the same ritual: stop, wire the logic analyzer onto the bus, capture, look, unwire it — then do it all again on the next attempt. The friction itself became the problem. I remember thinking: if this board just had a logic analyzer built in, this would be so much easier.
Around the same time I noticed something else. A J-Link debug probe is pricey — yet dev boards had quietly started shipping with one built in, free, just part of the board. You stopped thinking about the probe at all. So why stop at the debugger? Why not the logic analyzer, the serial console, the pin dashboard — all of it, permanently there, down one cable.
So I built it. The Superboard was the very next board I made.
These days I'm using the Superboard to bring up a different radio — an SI4463 — writing the driver on an RP2040, with the Superboard watching the whole thing as the logic analyzer.
I asked an AI coding agent to write the driver and flash it through the Superboard. It didn't work first time: the serial console wasn't printing the right data, the chip-read was failing. And that's when the agent stopped and asked:
“Shall we use the logic analyzer to see what the signals look like?”
It knew the board had one, and when the obvious path stalled, it reached for the instrument — exactly the move I'd make. The tool I built out of frustration on the nRF24 had become the thing an AI reaches for, unprompted, on the next radio.
Not an “AI-powered” board. What's true is plain: the
instruments speak text — la_cli captures to CSV, the
serial console is text, the debug probe is standard CMSIS-DAP — so
an agent can run the whole loop: write code, flash, capture,
read the waveform back as text, diagnose, repeat.
An in-app AI assistant is on the roadmap; the text interfaces it builds on exist today.
The Superboard is a small-batch prototype. Take a look, or get in touch to follow along.
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