Refract Systems

Refract Systems - Building Cyber-Physical Systems

[VirtMCU @VirtMCU]

Two MCUs from competing vendors, talking over Ethernet. No hardware.

Today's demo: an #ST and an #NXP microcontroller exchanging traffic over #Ethernet, entirely in #VirtMCU. Last week it was #Nordic and #Espressif over #Thread.

Semiconductor vendors build excellent tools, and some of the best firmware tooling comes straight from them. But each tool serves one vendor's chips.

I've spent two decades working on distributed embedded systems: WSNs, MANETs, IoT. Back then, heterogeneous MCUs talking over heterogeneous wired and wireless buses was a research vision. Today it's just a home with dozens of connected devices, or a car with 200+ MCUs.

And these systems are built by interconnecting products, each with silicon from different vendors.

That's the gap nobody had an incentive to fill: a tool for the interconnection between vendors, not for any single one. No silicon vendor will build an emulator for their competitors' chips.

Until now, if you built a product, you still couldn't simulate all of its electronics talking to each other.

This hurts more than just builders. Without simulation, buyers can't know what's possible with new silicon until they've committed to it. With VirtMCU, you can try the parts first, integrate the whole system, and then pick your vendors.

Enjoy the demo 👇

#Firmware #IoT #EmbeddedSystems #DigitalTwin #Microcontrollers #Simulation #Semiconductors #MCP #VirtMCU #RefractSystems

[Refract Systems @RefractSystems]

https://t.co/rnauYoofOD

[Refract Systems @RefractSystems]

If you are running agents on real work, you have probably already tried the loop. An agent, a task, a check, repeat until it says it is done. It works for an afternoon, then it stops, usually while producing something that looks finished.

So you reach for a graph. Nodes, edges, a router, a planner on top. It holds a little longer, and then the work stops fitting the graph.

The orchestration was never what was broken.

Four times in one day, an agent on our team reported something that wasn’t true.

None was a lie. None was a hallucination. Every one was an agent doing exactly what it had been told to do, carefully, while being wrong.

One said the build was green. It was green from a truncated view of the list. One gave four causes for an outage; the artifact that recorded it refuted all four. One said a secret was empty, when it was unreadable, which is a different problem with a different fix. One said a migration was done, and the commit it pointed at touched two dependency manifests and zero source files.

That last one happened inside the pull request that added the check meant to catch exactly this. It turned main red.

We already had the rules, and you probably do too. Paste the reverted-fix output. Verify by running. Never trust a claimed PASS you didn’t see produced. All written down, all in every agent’s context, all genuinely followed.

And every one of those rules asks an agent to be honest about its own work, so every one fails silently at the moment it matters, when the agent is confident. No graph fixes that. A better router still routes to an agent grading its own homework.

So we stopped writing rules.

We changed the shape of the organization instead. Two months later: one operator, no other engineers, 2,897 tickets closed, 1,164 explicitly declined, and around eighty pull requests merged a day.

None of it was invented. It mirrors an ordinary engineering organization, role by role, with an agent in each one. A VP that owns one organization’s whole queue. A director scoped to a single epic inside it. An individual contributor that holds one task and cannot dispatch. The practices came with the roles: the second pair of eyes, the design review that outranks the diff review, the ticket that cannot close on its author’s word.

We build digital twins of microcontrollers for a living, and the first one ships this month. Without quite meaning to, we built one of a team too.

A second report follows in a couple of days, about what broke underneath this one once it started working. It turned out to be our own build system, quietly.

Link in the comments. If you run agents at this rate, please share what your agents have told you confidently and wrongly.

#DigitalTwin #OrgEngineering

[VirtMCU @VirtMCU]

Introducing #Virtual #Microcontrollers: #VirtMCU

An instruction-accurate #emulator for off-the-shelf #microcontrollers (CPUs and their peripherals) with globally synchronized, deterministic network communication between nodes.

#Firmware #OpenThread #Simulation #MCP #OpenThread

[VirtMCU @VirtMCU]

An engineer is probably evaluating your chip right now. Would you even know?

Here's how VirtMCU works:
1. Engineers try your microcontroller virtually at virtmcu dot com. No board, no wait.
2. They run their real production firmware on it.
3. When they like what they see and want to buy, they click a link straight to your sales team.

You get leads who have already tested your chip with their own code. $0 to you.

Quick demo of the inventory page 👇

Want in? Like this post and send me a connection request. I'll reach out.

BONUS: everyone who reaches out gets an invite and credits to a private demo. You'll see your MCUs running virtually, and AI completing coding tasks on them automatically.

#Semiconductors #SalesLeads #EmbeddedSystems #Firmware #AI #VirtMCU #RefractSystems

[VirtMCU @VirtMCU]

@lightsilver323 Virtual Microcontrollers (https://t.co/nmEO6u5w7I) enables companies building, shipping, and maintaining software running on complex cyber-physical systems (Cars, SmartCity, Defense) by creating a digital twin of their products' microcontrollers and busses #VirtMCU.