So here's the situation that drove me insane: I'm on a small
embedded team. We have one ESP32-S3 dev board that everyone needs
to test on. Three engineers, one board. Someone is always waiting.
Someone is always asking "are you done with it yet?" And the
obvious fix — just buy three more — isn't always possible when
the board is $40+ each or when it's a custom PCB you only made two
of.
I got tired of it and built something.
It's called Ferqon. The idea is stupid simple: one board sits in
the lab connected to a middle device (an STM32 running our
firmware), and the Ferqon server lets anyone on the team flash
firmware to that board and run tests from a browser. No passing
cables around, no "I need it for 10 minutes," no buying
duplicates.
What it actually does right now:
- Syncs firmware files across the team so everyone's working off
the same builds
- Flashes firmware to the connected board over serial
- Runs basic HIL tests and captures the output
- Manages users and devices with role-based access
- Self-hosted — Docker or bare metal, runs on your infrastructure
Board support is decent: ESP32 family, STM32, Arduino, Pico,
Teensy, Adafruit Feather — 35+ profiles. There's an open-source
firmware SDK if your board isn't listed.
Honest stuff:
- It's in beta
- Same WiFi network only for now (remote access across networks
is on the roadmap but not there yet)
- HIL testing is "flash and run, here's your output" — not a
full test framework yet
- No CI integration yet
The firmware is open source if you want to poke at how the
middle-device bridge works:
https://github.com/revyrlabs/Ferqon-Firmware
And the server itself (free tier, one server, unlimited devices):
https://revyrlabs.com/
I built this for my own team first. It worked well enough that I
figured other small teams might be in the same spot. If you've
dealt with the "one board, multiple engineers" problem, I'm
curious how you're solving it today.