Heeeey, we’re just having a super chill vibe here at the desk of Ladyada—writing a driver for the uBlox M8Q, which has both I2C and UART interfaces. As expected, it can do everyday NMEA output, but it can also do UBX, a “compressed” protocol for advanced data reads and writes over I2C/UART—or even SPI on some other chips.

However, the UBX protocol is a hugely complex driver to implement, with dozens of commands and hundreds of flags. But why stress when you can viiiibe? We’re using this beast of a spec as an excuse to try out the new Claude 3.7, which is doing great at chomping through the UBX documentation roughage and giving us some nice code on the other side. Within an hour, we’re able to connect and switch to UBX mode by sending a well-formed message and receiving an ACK.

What we like about coding with a good LLM is that it does the work we sometimes get lazy over, like handling various error conditions, timeouts, and verbose error messages – video.