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OpenClaw vs. a 475-page datasheet: let the robot do the transcribing

OpenClaw vs. a 475-page datasheet: let the robot do the transcribing

Adafruit Industries vor 7 Monaten

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Adafruit Industries

198 Episoden

DIY electronics projects & much more

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The u-blox SAM-M8Q has been sitting on my bench for months. This
little GPS module has a built-in antenna, coin cell backup, speaks
both NMEA and UBX binary protocol over UART or I2C. So why isn't it
in the shop already? Well, it's mostly cause of the 475-page
interfacing datasheet documenting every command, struct, and config
register. Hundreds of message types. I got partway through by hand
with some Claude Code Sonnet assistance, but ran out of time - plus
it was still tedious when babysitting Sonnet. However, now we're
living in an Opus + Codex era! So I pointed my Raspberry Pi
OpenClaw at it. https://github.com/adafruit/openclaw Here's the
setup: Raspberry Pi 5 running OpenClaw, wired to a QT Py RP2040,
which talks to the SAM-M8Q. Opus 4.6 reads the datasheet (converted
to markdown first by Sonnet 4.6 with 1M context to minimize
re-parsing that PDF every session) and builds the implementation
plan. I review the plan to make sure it prioritizes the most common
commands and reports, and flagged some unessential sections like
automotive-assist or RTK-specific. Then Codex is assigned each
message implementation task as a sub-agent and writes the actual C
code for the Arduino library. Opus suggested using struct-based
parsing rather than digging through each uint8_t array; we just
memcpy the checksummed message raw bytes onto the matching struct
and extract the typed bit fields. We've got four message types done
so far. After each message is implemented, Codex also writes a test
sketch that will exercise / pretty-print the results of each
message, great for self-testing as well as regression testing
later. Tonight I'm telling it to keep going while I sleep: code,
parse, test against live satellite data, fix failures, commit and
push on success, then move on to the next. To me this is a great
usage of "agentic" firmware development: there's no creativity in
transcribing 84 different structs from a 475-page datasheet. Once
the LLMs are done, I can review the PRs as if it were an everyday
contributor and even make revision suggestions. Visit the Adafruit
shop online - http://www.adafruit.com
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