hardware-logging

Structured, crash-aware serial logging for embedded boards — built so AI coding agents can debug firmware recursively.

hwlog runs a small daemon that owns your board's serial port and records everything to structured sessions on disk. Your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, anything) never touches the port — it queries the recording through bounded CLI commands or native MCP tools, flashes through a port-safe wrapper, and verifies behavior instead of assuming "it compiled" means "it works."

┌──────────┐  serial   ┌──────────────┐   JSONL    ┌─────────────────────┐
│  ESP32 / │ ────────► │ hwlog daemon │ ─────────► │  session on disk    │
│  any MCU │  ◄──────  │ (owns port)  │            │  logs · boots ·     │
└──────────┘   send    └──────┬───────┘            │  decoded crashes    │
                              │ pause/resume       └──────────┬──────────┘
                       ┌──────┴───────┐                       │ bounded queries
                       │ hwlog flash  │            ┌──────────┴──────────┐
                       │ -- idf.py …  │            │  coding agent       │
                       └──────────────┘            │  (CLI or MCP tools) │
                                                   └─────────────────────┘

Why

Wiring a coding agent to a dev board fails in predictable ways: blocking monitors hang the agent, flashing fights the monitor for the port (and looks exactly like a bricked board), ESP32-S3 native USB drops all output until DTR is asserted, ports renumber on replug, crashes scroll away before anyone reads them, and a raw log dump blows the agent's context window. hwlog packages the fixes — learned from real hardware incidents — into one tool.

Related MCP server: Firmware MCP Server

Features

• Persistent capture sessions — logs are recorded to disk continuously; the crash that happened while your agent was thinking is still there

• Structure at ingest — ANSI stripped; ESP-IDF and Arduino log formats parsed into {level, tag, msg, timestamp}; everything else passes through

• Boot-cycle segmentation — "show me logs since the last boot" is one flag (--boot -1); reboot loops are instantly visible in hwlog boots

• Crash reports, assembled and decoded — panics/watchdogs/heap corruption are detected, captured as complete multi-line artifacts, and symbolized with addr2line against ELFs archived at flash time

• Bounded, agent-budget-aware queries — line, byte, scan, regex-runtime, and timeout ceilings plus repeated-line collapse (heartbeat (×347))

• Flash-safe port arbitration — hwlog flash -- <cmd> holds an exclusive pause lease, invalidates stale symbols on every attempt, resumes when the tool exits, and conservatively archives one generation-bound ELF candidate

• Behavioral verification — hwlog wait --pattern "setup done" --timeout 20 includes output captured since the latest flash boundary and provides CI-friendly exit codes

• MCP server + bundled agent skill — hwlog mcp exposes everything as native agent tools; hwlog init installs a debug playbook (crash-signature triage, loop protocol) into your project

Works with anything that talks serial: ESP32 family first-class, plus RP2040, STM32, nRF, Arduino — identified by USB VID.

Installation

uv tool install hardware-logging   # or: pip install hardware-logging

Or run without installing: uvx --from hardware-logging hwlog ports

The background daemon and its Unix-socket control channel support macOS and Linux.

Quick Start

hwlog ports                     # find your board
hwlog start                     # background capture daemon (auto-detects the board)
hwlog flash -- idf.py flash     # flash through the wrapper (exclusive pause + candidate ELF archive)
hwlog wait --pattern "setup done" --timeout 20   # verify it actually booted
hwlog logs --boot -1 --tail 50  # structured logs from the latest boot
hwlog crashes --last            # full decoded crash artifact, if it crashed

What a crash looks like

The whole point of the flash-time ELF archive: when the board panics, you get source lines, not addresses. Representative output:

$ hwlog crashes --last
crash 1: Guru Meditation Error: Core  1 panic'ed (LoadProhibited). Exception was unhandled.
--- raw ---
Guru Meditation Error: Core  1 panic'ed (LoadProhibited). Exception was unhandled.
Core  1 register dump:
PC      : 0x400d1234  PS      : 0x00060530  A0      : 0x800d5678  A1      : 0x3ffb1230
Backtrace: 0x400d1234:0x3ffb1234 0x400d5678:0x3ffb5678 0x400dabcd:0x3ffb9abc
Rebooting...
--- decoded backtrace ---
0x400d1234: sensor_read_task at main/sensor.c:87
0x400d5678: read_i2c_register at main/i2c_helpers.c:41
0x400dabcd: vTaskDelay at freertos/tasks.c:1456

The artifact is assembled from the multi-line panic dump (register dump, backtrace, reboot marker) and symbolized with addr2line against the ELF archived by the most recent hwlog flash. No archived ELF yet? The raw addresses are kept and the report says why decoding was skipped.

For coding agents

hwlog init                      # install the agent skill + CLAUDE.md snippet

Or add the MCP server (Claude Code shown):

claude mcp add hardware-logging -- uvx --from hardware-logging hwlog mcp

Agents get query_logs, list_boots, get_crash, wait_for_pattern, send_to_device, capture_status. Device telemetry is labeled untrusted, and MCP device writes are disabled unless the user sets HWLOG_MCP_ALLOW_SEND=1.

Session data and the local daemon control channel are owner-only. Metadata writes are atomic, selectors cannot escape the session root, and ambiguous multi-board selections require an explicit port.

Storage and query scans are bounded by default (512 MiB per session, 4 GiB total, 64 MiB query scan window) — see storage limits and architecture for budgets, drop counters, and the HWLOG_MAX_* / HWLOG_QUERY_SCAN_BYTES overrides.

The agent debug loop

1. hwlog start — capture runs continuously, owns the port

2. hwlog flash -- <cmd> — port-safe flashing, with conservative ELF discovery for symbolization

3. hwlog wait --pattern <expected> — behavioral assertion, not compile-and-hope

4. hwlog logs / hwlog crashes --last — bounded evidence, decoded backtraces

5. Fix firmware, repeat

Documentation

Full docs in /docs: architecture · CLI reference · MCP server · agent workflow

License

MIT