Every other headline wants to tell you that AI is coming for your job. It makes for a great panic, but it’s the wrong frame. AI isn’t going to make engineers redundant. It’s going to make a handful of things we’ve spent our whole careers wrestling with redundant – and honestly, good riddance to most of them.
How does one Betaflight binary run on hundreds of different boards? The answer is a single header file per board – a wiring diagram written in C. Here is a line-by-line walk through a real one, the RP2350-based HELLBENDER.
Everyone is vibe coding. So can you vibe debug actual hardware – hand an LLM a logic-analyser capture or a register dump and let it reason about what the silicon is doing? I tried it on real DSHOT traces and RP2350 register dumps. The results were equal parts impressive and alarming.
Is AI coming for the embedded engineer? I think that is the wrong question. Here is the honest, day-to-day version – where an LLM genuinely earns its keep on a real C firmware codebase, and where it falls flat on its face the moment hardware is involved.
We’ve talked a lot about DShot over the years – 150 through 1200, and even the SpiSHOT what-if. This is the chapter that ties it together: getting RPM telemetry back from the ESC on the very same wire, and using it to filter the gyro at exactly the right frequencies.
A flight controller needs more UARTs, motor outputs and timing-critical signals than the RP2350 has hardware for. PIO – the chip’s programmable I/O – quietly conjures the missing peripherals out of thin air. Here is how Betaflight uses it.
Betaflight now runs on the RP2350 – the dual Cortex-M33 chip behind the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. Here is the exact VS Code, Cortex-Debug and OpenOCD setup I use to step through firmware on an RP2350B board, breakpoints, peripheral registers and all.
