ESP32 Bit Pirate Turns Boards Into Bench Tools

What is it about the ESP32 that makes it so terrific for so many different projects?

Geo has created the ESP32 Bit Pirate. Inspired by the Bus Pirate, this pirate is a Swiss-army-knife firmware set of hardware debugging tools.

“It came from a very practical need: when developing or debugging hardware, there is often a moment where you need to interact directly with a chip, sensor, flash memory, bus, or unknown device at a low level. ESP32 Bit Pirate is designed for that kind of work: sending raw transactions, scanning buses, dumping memory, testing devices, reverse engineering protocols, or quickly validating hardware without writing a dedicated firmware each time.” – Geo

It runs on a range of supported devices, from an ordinary ESP32-S3 dev kit to the M5 Cardputer. In the Cardputer’s case, you can use the built-in keyboard and screen to run debugging tools without a separate device.

While this is presumably useful for any sort of on-the-go hardware debugging, Geo says it’s especially useful for debugging unknown sensors. “Instead of writing a custom test program, you can connect the ESP32 Bit Pirate, scan the bus to find the device address, read or write registers manually, dump the register map, and quickly understand how the component behaves. The same idea applies to SPI flash chips, UART devices, infrared remotes, Sub-GHz receivers, and many other interfaces.”

While the mere phrase “hardware debugging” in the description might seem daunting, it’s documented with beginners in mind too. Ideally, there’s something in it for everyone. “I see it being used by embedded developers, hardware hackers, reverse engineers, students, and makers who need a flexible, accessible, and intuitive tool for exploring electronics and debugging boards.”

You can find more details on the GitHub repository.