The AI debug box for wearables and voice gadgets — for people who write firmware with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor

Let your AI debug the wearable.

A coin cell, µA sleep current, one USB-C port, an LED and a beep. VCMD gives your coding agent hands, eyes and ears on the real device: it flashes, power-cycles, reads logs, measures current, watches the LED and listens for the prompt tone — looping until the device meets the checks you set.

Get early-bird access How it works

Planned price $199 · Early bird $99 for the first 100 · Open-source software

Concept — final design may change

Built around small, battery-powered devices

If it runs on a tiny battery, has one USB-C port and talks back with a light or a beep, VCMD was designed for it.

AI pendants and voice recorders

Wake, record, upload, sleep: your agent checks every step and the µA in between.

Rings and bands

Battery sag on BLE bursts, charging through the contacts, and sleep current after every firmware change.

Earbuds and audio glasses

Prompt tones, button presses, pairing and the charging case — flashing and logs through the one USB-C port.

BLE sensors and trackers

Promising months of battery life? Check the sleep current and wake-ups tonight, not in months.

Not a fit yet: devices you can't open or flash, like store-bought rings, glasses or phones without a debug port; chips that need JTAG, or breakpoint debugging (SWD covers flashing, erasing, resets and reading or writing memory); mains-powered or multi-cell lithium gear; RF measurements like transmit power or sensitivity, and signal-integrity work.

AI writes the firmware. Then a human grabs the multimeter.

Bench skills required

Probing with a multimeter, cutting and swapping wires, pressing reset, squinting at an LED. Your agent can't do any of it — so you do.

USB meters miss the battery side

In-line USB meters count the charger and LEDs too. You only see real battery life by emulating the battery.

Someone has to be there

Every flash–reset–measure cycle waits for a person. The agent stalls and the loop never closes.

Hands, eyes, ears and a memory for your AI

Everything a person does at the bench, in a deck-of-cards box your agent can drive.

HANDS

Power, probe and press

Battery emulation that sources and sinks, µA-to-A current, test probes, two serial consoles, reset, boot and button pins, two switchable USB-C ports. Sealed device? An add-on pusher presses the real button.

EYES

A camera on a cable

Clip it next to your board. Your agent checks LEDs, screens and the board itself — no more “is it blinking?”

EARS

A built-in mic

Hears beeps and prompt tones from your device, and takes your voice: hold TALK and say what you want.

MEMORY

Keeps notes on your boards

VCMD can usually tell your boards apart and keeps a history for each one on the microSD card: what was tested, the numbers, what was ruled out. Change computers, teammates or AI tools, and your agent can read that history instead of starting over. If a reading looks worse than last time, it can point that out.

Tests the connection, too: VCMD's own BLE and Wi-Fi can stand in for the phone or router your device talks to. Your agent can scan for it, connect, read and write GATT, push an OTA update over BLE, and drop the link to see whether it comes back. On Wi-Fi it can host a test hotspot for provisioning and reconnect tests.

One timeline: every log line, current sample and pin event shares a clock, so your agent can see which line caused that spike.

Real battery life, not a USB guess

VCMD stands in for the battery, so your agent sees exactly what the battery would supply — no charger or LED current mixed in.

Emulates the battery you actually use

Pick Li-ion, LiFePO4, coin cell, alkaline, NiMH or zinc-air. VCMD sets the voltage range and emulates internal resistance, so a coin cell sags on a radio burst just like the real one.

µA to A, no dropouts

Auto-ranges from 1 µA to 2 A without interrupting power, so deep sleep and radio bursts land in one trace.

Tests charging too

It also sinks about 0.5 A, so your agent can check the charging circuit against an emulated battery.

A full battery in hours

Follow the real discharge curve with a shrunk capacity to go from full to shutdown in hours, or power-cycle hundreds of times overnight to catch brown-outs. Built for testing low-battery behavior, not a substitute for a real battery-life test.

Already have a PPK2?

The Power Profiler Kit II is a good current meter, and Nordic's own tools now let an AI agent read it. VCMD is meant to cover the rest of the bench loop as well.

	PPK2	VCMD (planned)
µA-to-A current on the battery side	✓	✓
Switch the device's power on and off	✓	✓
Sink current to test charging	—	✓ about 0.5 A
Battery models (internal resistance, discharge curve)	Fixed voltage	✓
Serial consoles, reset and button pins	Logic inputs only	✓
SWD flashing	Needs a separate debugger	✓
Camera and microphone	—	✓
BLE and Wi-Fi connection tests	—	✓
Price	about $100	$199 planned · $99 early bird

PPK2 details are from Nordic's public specs. VCMD figures are plans and may change.

Want to try it early? We're building a small first run of our own boards for a few paid pilots. We set up the agent loop with you on your own board and aim to get one test running unattended. Ask about a pilot →

From a rat's nest to one box

Plug VCMD into your computer, then connect the battery and a few signal wires: headers, clips or short solder leads.

One sentence in. A finished bench loop out.

1
Wire it up

Connect the battery leads, then serial and reset: clip or plug in where you can, solder a few short leads where you can't. VCMD checks the wiring.
2
Hand over the docs

Drop in the datasheet or SDK from your chip vendor — or let your agent find them.
3
Say the goal

Hold TALK: “sleep under 30 µA, LED blinks green.”
4
Set the checks, walk away

Your agent flashes, powers, measures, watches and listens until your checks pass. It can't change the checks; if it gets stuck, it stops and reports. The screen shows progress.

Not passing yet? The agent changes the code and runs the loop again.

Every step is a command

Your agent drives VCMD like any other CLI, and every call returns JSON. MCP server included — works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and any agent that can run a shell command.

bench

$ vcmd check
  ✓ battery: load found · usb1: serial on D+/D−, 115200
$ vcmd listen
  ● "sleep under 30 µA, LED blinks green"
$ vcmd power on --volt 3.85
$ vcmd uart 1 --until "boot ok"
$ vcmd measure --secs 50 --skip 30
  {"avg_ua": 18.4, "pass": true}
$ vcmd cam led
  {"color": "green", "blink_hz": 1.0, "pass": true}
  ✓ goal met

Built an ESP32 or Arduino project? That's enough.

No bench skills needed. Connect the essentials with as little soldering as possible; the AI takes it from there.

Your AI shows you where

It reads your device's docs and tells you which pad each wire goes to. A wiring card ships in the box.

Forgiving by design

Reverse-polarity and short protection on the battery port, protected signal pins.

It figures out the rest

Finds the baud rate, swaps TX/RX in software, detects each port's logic level, and tells USB from serial on a shared USB-C port.

Self-check before every run

VCMD tells your agent what's connected — and what isn't.

No multimeter needed. Test probes come in the box. Your AI says “red on TP3, black on GND”, picks the range, saves the reading once it settles and tells you what it means. Both probes are high-impedance and neither is grounded, so a wrong touch won't short through the box, and VCMD cuts power before every resistance check.

Planned v1 specs

Subject to change as we build. Early-access members help decide.

Battery emulation: 0.8–5 V adjustable · sources 1 A (2 A with a USB-C PD adapter) · sinks about 0.5 A to test charging · battery presets with internal resistance and discharge curves (Li-ion, LiFePO4, coin cell, alkaline, NiMH, zinc-air)
Current: 1 µA – 2 A auto-ranging · ≥ 100 kSa/s · no dropout on range switch
Serial: 2 × UART, ≥ 921,600 bps · 1.2–5 V logic, set per port · auto baud and TX/RX swap
SWD: Built-in CMSIS-DAP probe for nRF, STM32 and similar chips · flash, erase, reset, read and write memory · works with pyOCD, OpenOCD and probe-rs · no separate debugger to buy
I/O: 4 outputs for reset, boot, buttons and add-ons (PWM) · 2 inputs
Voltage: 4 inputs, 0–24 V, for checking power rails
Probes: In the box · DC volts to ±30 V, resistance, continuity beep, diode · AI picks the range and cuts power before resistance checks · not for mains
USB-C outputs: 2 ports · VBUS and data switch separately · current on each · serial over the USB-C pins (D+/D− or SBU), auto-detected
Wireless: BLE and Wi-Fi as the other end for your device: scan, connect, GATT read and write, OTA over BLE, drop and reconnect · test hotspot for provisioning · connection tests, not RF measurements like transmit power or sensitivity
Eyes & ears: External USB camera on a cable · built-in microphone
On the box: 1.9″ screen · PAGE and TALK buttons · microSD logging and per-board history
Add-ons: I²C sensors (color, temperature) · button pusher · USB Ethernet
To your board: Battery leads plus a ribbon cable: headers, Dupont jumpers, clips or short solder leads
Host: One USB-C · CLI and MCP · JSON output · macOS, Linux, Windows
Size: 88 × 60 × 20 mm — about a deck of cards

Open software, finished hardware

The vcmd CLI, MCP server and command protocol will be open source, so you can script it, extend it or plug it into any AI tool. The hardware comes as a finished, tested box.

CLI + MCP server
Open command protocol
Works with any MCP client
Early bird: $99 for the first 100

Get early-bird access

The first 100 boxes go to people on this list at the early-bird price of $99 (planned retail $199). You also get build updates and a chance to test prototypes.

Need it sooner? Before the full box, we're making a small first run of our own boards for a few paid pilots. Tick the pilot box and we'll email you the details.