EMBEDDED SF: CraftifAI Physical AI Hackathon

A 10-hour hackathon where you go from a plain-English spec to firmware running on a real dev board, or to a computer vision model doing real-time inference on a GPU, using CraftifAI's AI agents for hardware engineers. 📅 Wednesday, Sept 30, 2026 · 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM PT📍 Frontier Tower, San Francisco, CA👤 Individual participation, no teams🛠 Dev boards and sensors provided, cloud GPUs available Why we're running this AI coding agents changed how software gets shipped, but embedded development has barely moved. Ask a general-purpose model for an STM32 peripheral driver and you often get code that compiles cleanly, then fails on the bench because the model guessed the clock tree configuration or the pin mux. Firmware and on-device AI depend on hardware context that chat-based tools never see. CraftifAI builds agents that work with that context. FirmGen writes, compiles, debugs and flashes firmware for ESP32 and STM32 MCUs. PipeGen turns Python CV code and ONNX models into optimized, production-ready NVIDIA DeepStream apps, benchmarked and containerized. This hackathon is your chance to put both to the test on real hardware, in a single day. Track 1 · FirmGen: Embedded Firmware Describe the device you want to build, whether it's a robot subsystem, a wearable or a sensor node. FirmGen plans the firmware architecture, writes the drivers and application logic, then compiles, debugs and flashes it to the board on your desk. ESP32 and STM32 dev boards and sensors are provided on site. Bring: a laptop with a USB port. Track 2 · PipeGen: Computer Vision & Perception Describe what you want the camera to detect and what should happen when it does. PipeGen builds the perception stack and deploys it for real-time inference, starting from its library of benchmarked models. Bring: your laptop. If it has an NVIDIA GPU, build on it directly. If it doesn't, we'll spin up a cloud GPU instance for you. Every participant builds solo and picks one track when registering. Accepted hackers receive their track's project briefs before the event. Who should apply Firmware and embedded engineers, robotics engineers, computer vision and perception engineers, and hardware founders who want to see how far AI agents can go on real hardware. Pre-hack office hours On Tuesday, Sept 29, 7:00 – 9:00 PM PT, accepted hackers join a live session with the CraftifAI engineering team to set up access, test their board or cloud GPU, and get technical questions answered before the day. Agenda 9:00 – 10:00 AM — Check-in & Hardware Pickup10:00 – 10:30 AM — Keynote from CraftifAI founders Pratik Sharda (CEO) and Yashwant Dagar (CTO), live from Bengaluru10:30 – 11:45 AM — Hands-on Labs: FirmGen and PipeGen walkthroughs with the CraftifAI team11:45 AM – 12:30 PM — Lunch & Mentor Check-ins12:30 – 4:00 PM — Hacking & Testing, with the CraftifAI team online for technical support4:00 – 4:30 PM — Top 5 Evaluation4:30 – 4:45 PM — Buffer4:45 – 5:15 PM — Live Demos & Presentations5:15 – 6:00 PM — Closing Ceremony & Awards6:00 – 7:00 PM — Demo Showcase & Networking Prizes Grand Prize: $1,000 cash + hardware prizes + OpenAI/Daytona credits Best Perception Pipeline: Recognition for innovative use of PipeGen Best Firmware & Edge Integration: Recognition for advanced use of FirmGen About CraftifAI CraftifAI is building the AI engineering layer for physical products. Every robot, drone, smart camera and industrial controller runs on firmware and perception software that engineers still write by hand, against datasheets, board revisions and silicon constraints that general-purpose AI doesn't understand. Our mission is to give hardware engineers agents that reason about the hardware the way they do, so a working device is hours away instead of months. Orbit, our platform, brings together FirmGen for firmware, PipeGen for computer vision and AgentIQ for FPGA design. EMBEDDED SF is the second edition of our hackathon series. The first was held at Microsoft, Bengaluru. Spots are limited. Organized by Devnovate