Where to start
Describe the device you want in one sentence — say, “a rangefinder that measures how far away the obstacle in front is, once a second, and shows the reading live on my phone” — and WhispBuild settles the hardware plan, writes the firmware and builds it. You flash the firmware onto a dev board, and the device runs.
Pick a path first
No dev board yet →
Start from nothing. See what plan the platform hands you first, then decide which parts to order.
Already have a dev board →
Name your board model in the description and the platform builds the plan around that board, so you can skip picking a board in Step 0; the sensor, the jumper wires and the breadboard still have to be ordered from the list.
Clone a ready-made project →
The fastest way to see a result. Pick a project someone else has finished, swap in your own Wi-Fi settings, and flash it.
Hit a problem? Jump straight to it
The board is plugged in, but nothing detects it
The port list is empty, and there is no error message anywhere.
Flashing fails
It fails at the very start, or it stops at some percentage and never moves on.
The serial output is garbled
It is connected, but the output is unreadable.
The build never passes
It says the build failed, but not what you are supposed to do about it.
How it works
The whole platform is built around one chat box. You describe what you need, and it does four things:
| 1 · Settle the hardware | Picks the microcontroller and the sensors and plans the pins, producing a plan you can order from as a list and wire from as a table. That plan takes effect only after you confirm it. |
|---|---|
| 2 · Write the firmware | Writes the code against the confirmed hardware plan. You do not need to read C++. |
| 3 · Build | Compiles in the cloud into a firmware file you can flash directly. When it fails it tells you why, and it repairs most failures on its own. |
| 4 · Deliver | Flash straight from the browser, or download the firmware and flash it with the tool you already use. Stay connected after flashing and you can read the serial log. |
The top of the home page is one input box, with the projects you have already created in the left rail; below the box sit two tabs, My projects and Public shares — the first lists your own project cards, the second lists projects other people have published. That same box takes questions — “which projects do I have”, “open the one that uses ultrasonic ranging”. It knows what each project is for and what hardware it is made of, so you can point at a project loosely, without remembering its exact name.
Three things to know before you start
You need a real dev board. The platform has no simulator. Firmware has to be flashed onto hardware before the result can be verified. See what to prepare →
Flashing works in Chrome and Edge only. Firefox and Safari have no WebSerial capability, so they cannot flash from the browser. You can download the firmware at any time and flash it with the tool you already use.
The platform cannot see how you actually wired things. The pin table is derived from documentation, not measured on your bench. Check it against the physical parts before you wire anything — the product interface carries the same warning.
What the platform cannot do yet
Listed up front so you do not go looking: simulators and virtual devices, billing and credits (marked “Coming soon” in the interface), a command-line tool and an SDK.
Only two frameworks are supported, esp-idf and arduino. The boards it can actually produce firmware for are most of the ESP32 family, ESP8266 boards and the Arduino Uno R3 (the classic AVR one) — not every ESP32 variant is covered, and STM32, Raspberry Pi Pico and the like will not build at all. Full list →
These docs are readable without signing in. In the product, creating a project or cloning one requires an account; public projects are readable without signing in, and their firmware is downloadable.