Noah Pacik-Nelson
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How many times has your engineering team fixed the same firmware bug twice: once in the lab, and again after it resurfaced in the field? If you're like us, the answer is "more times than we want to admit."
That’s why, today, we're excited to announce BootLoop Test. A hardware-in-the-loop testing framework that brings enterprise-grade testing to every team, BootLoop Test lets you do more with the engineers you already have.
It’s the solution we wished we had 5 years ago when we were sending rockets to space and designing ventilators for COVID. And it’s one that we know will make your life and products better.
Why we built this
Every firmware engineer I've ever worked with knows they should be testing more. They just don't have the time, budget, or tools. In 2025, at least 166 automaker recalls were traced to software issues, marking an all- time high and the sixth consecutive year that number has increased. Recalls are the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of firmware that shipped without being exercised the way it should have been.
Meanwhile, the engineers who could solve this issue are in short supply. Around 80% of embedded engineering job postings go unfilled for months. The engineers who are already on staff spend the majority of their time on bring-up, debugging and validation. With so many other priorities and pressure to ship products, engineers deprioritize establishing a rigorous testing program and sometimes avoid it entirely.
For these reasons, leaner hardware organizations often end up with a testing solution more akin to a jumbled collection of scripts. It works for the bug they're fixing today, but it’s not repeatable or feasible at scale. And it definitely isn’t the solution that’s going to take you through manufacturing. A bench engineer might write a quick check with a logic analyzer, but when the manufacturing engineer tries to reimplement the same setup six months later, it’s nearly impossible.
We didn’t see any solutions available. So we built one.
One framework, your entire hardware lifecycle
We designed BootLoop Test to bring enterprise-scale testing and uniformity to every team.
Here's how it works:
Write the test at your bench: BootLoop Test runs an AI agent that knows your codebase, your schematics, and your bench. When you're debugging an issue or bringing up a new board, you ask the agent for a test or write one yourself. The agent compiles it against your toolchain, flashes your board, and runs it against your bench setup, which you define in your Bench Graph.
Promote it to CI with one click: Once the test does what you want, you press a single button. From that moment on, that same test can run against every commit. You don't need to rewrite it for CI or reimplement it for a different runner. Your team can also use that test, allowing everyone to work together to build more coverage. The test you wrote on your bench is the test that protects the hardware forever.
Run the same test at end-of-line: When your hardware ships to manufacturing, the test can ship with it. The production operator can scan each unit, and the BootLoop Test CI API will run the same test the firmware engineer wrote on day one, with the result landing in the same place as every prior run.
Trace any failure back across the whole lifecycle: Every run – whether bench, CI, end-of-line, or field – lands in one unified Run History. If a unit fails in production, you can pull up that exact test in your browser and see every prior run of it, going back to the moment the firmware engineer first wrote it on their bench. One source of truth across the whole lifecycle, with no spreadsheets to reconcile. For companies with functional safety requirements or in regulated industries, you can get test result retention - along with the binaries, test code, and bench configuration - for 7 years or more.
What you’re getting
One framework from R&D to manufacturing. The tests created during hardware bring-up become end-of-line tests in production. Tests grow over time are shared across firmware, QA, and manufacturing teams.
AI-assisted authoring, Deterministic execution. AI generates test suites and components from your firmware codebase and hardware understanding. Anyone can quickly add more test coverage - ensuring your technology meets engineering, certification and business requirements..
Configure benches anywhere in the world. Quickly enroll any Linux computer as a test bench. Connect equipment via a no-code visual interface. Tests are portable - write once, run on any capable bench
Red/green Confidence in CI and EOL.
Use it for CI, validating new board revisions, end-of-line testing and gathering evidence for certification. Web-accessible results with full version control - visible to the whole company.
What this means for you
If you're a firmware engineer, tests can be authored by the team ahead of development as requirements or automatically by the agent during bring-up. Quickly add new coverage as bugs are solved, features are added, or hardware changes to always stay ahead. Build all day, test all night.
If you're a VP of engineering, you no longer need a 10-person test engineering department or months of setup to have good HIL and integration-level testing. BootLoop Test gets you there in days, with the engineers you already have. A lot of people think testing is just a reliability unlock, but it’s also a velocity unlock. Once your firmware team, EEs, and production line are running on the same framework, everything gets faster.
If you're a hardware startup founder, you can ship with the testing posture of a company 10x your size. The HIL program your customers expect you to have is something you can stand up with five engineers, not fifty.
See it on your hardware
BootLoop Test runs on whatever you're already working on. The chipset doesn’t matter. The toolchain doesn't matter. The bench doesn't matter. Any equipment that we don’t support out of the box can be created for you by the BootLoop Test agent.
If you've been waiting for the moment when real HIL testing stopped being something only the big aerospace primes could afford, this is it. Come, let us prove it on your board.
Book a demo, and we'll have a test running on your hardware in under an hour.
-- Noah