Launch HN: Memfault (YC W19) – Crashlytics for Firmware
We're Chris, François, and Tyler, founders of Memfault (https://memfault.com). Memfault helps firmware teams find and fix issues before customers start calling (or worse, tweeting!) by providing a small <3kB SDK to include in the firmware and a web dashboard to manage releases, monitor devices, and view crashes. In the software world, Crashlytics, Sentry, and other error monitoring systems have been offering similar solutions for years. Memfault is the first such solution for firmware.
Embedded devices today are very different from ones built 10 years ago. Then, a device would run a small piece of firmware in a while() loop, capture input, compute some logic, write to a small 7-segment display, and that was about it.
Today, new products have a wireless connection to the internet, a bright 320x320 full color LCD, a high quality microphone and speaker for Alexa integration, and sometimes even run machine learning or computer vision algorithms on device! Building hardware products in 2019 is a significant software project, it requires software tools.
The three of us met at Pebble in 2013, where we shipped 4 watches together. Chris and Tyler went on to work at Fitbit, while François went to Oculus. Each time, we found ourselves building all of our tools from scratch which slowed us down tremendously. Imagine having to build a log collection solution every time you want to build a new web app!
As a result of the effort required to build them, the tools available to firmware engineers are not up to the task. For example, the state of the art in debugging requires connecting a physical debugger to your board. To investigate an error report from the field, customers must be contacted, devices shipped back, and enclosures disassembled. By the time this is all done, flash logs have rolled over, variables have reset, and developers are left scraping together raw data from flash to debug the issue. It can take weeks to get to the bottom of an issue that would be root caused in minutes with reasonable tools.
We've long wanted to show people what Memfault can do without the hurdle of integrating our SDK into their code. Today, we are launching a zero code, try-it-at-your-desk version of our tool available at https://memfault.com (click on the "Try Memfault" button"). In about 5 minutes, you should be able to connect a ARM Cortex-M based development board and upload an error report using a GDB script. If you do not have a board, you'll be able to interact with an example error report.
We could go in at length about the implementations (ask us questions in the comments!). One thing we're especially proud of is the "Globals & Statics" tab which lets you query the state of any static or global variable in your system. To get this to work, we cross compiled libdwarf to wasm via emscripten and used it to implement parts of an in-browser debugger which can be used to look up values for a known symbol given an elf file and a Memfault core file.
We'd love to hear what you think, and find out what other tools you've found helpful in this space. Looking forward to the discussion!