This tutorial provides you everything you need to know to get started with the Temboo Agent for AI-driven embedded systems development.

In just a few minutes you’ll have:

• The Temboo Agent running inside your IDE
• An understanding of how to prompt the agent to help you with real embedded programming tasks

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Create An Account

If you haven’t already, create a Temboo account.

Step 2: Install The Extension

Next, open your IDE.

To install the extension in VS Code or CCS, navigate to the Extensions view, search for “Temboo” and install the extension.

The agent currently supports Texas Instruments (via the Code Composer Studio IDE), Nordic Semiconductor (VS Code), and ESP32 (VS Code).

Step 3: Add Your Account Credentials

Once you’ve installed the agent, you’ll need to add your Temboo account credentials to the settings.json file in your IDE.

To add your Temboo account credentials, follow these steps:

• In VS Code (or CSS), open the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P)
• Type “settings” to find your user preferences file (settings.json)
• Paste in the Temboo account credentials that you were given when you created your Temboo account
• Save your settings.json file

Step 4: Open The Temboo Agent

Now it’s time to open the Temboo Agent.

To access the agent, open the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P) and type “Temboo: Chat“.

Step 5: Start Prompting The Agent

Now you’re ready to start prompting the agent! You can ask the agent anything about embedded development. “What can you help me with?” is a perfectly good starting question.

Before the agent responds to your first prompt you’ll be asked to select your hardware platform so that the agent can tailor its responses to the chip you’re working with.

When you think about writing prompts, its useful to approach the agent as you would an experienced engineering colleague. Instead of “Why doesn’t my I2C work?” you should say something like “My I2C peripheral doesn’t respond as expected. Please review my pin config, driver init, and task setup, and suggest likely causes. I’ve attached my code as additional context for you“. The key insight here is that you’re telling the agent where to look and why, rather than just telling it that there’s a problem. A collaborative, conversational back and forth approach works best.

You can ask the agent to explain code, to refactor existing code, to generate new code, to advise on architectural decisions, to explain APIs, to sanity check your work, to debug errors, and lots, lots more.

That’s it!

At this point, you should have:

• The Temboo agent running inside your IDE
• Verified that you can run a prompt
• A basic understanding of what makes a good prompt
• A basic understanding of how the Temboo Agent can help you accomplish embedded programming tasks

Next up, I recommend that you open a real project, ask genuine questions about your code, and see how the agent can help you. That’s the fastest way to figure out how to incorporate the agent into your existing embedded development workflow.

Need Help?

Need help getting set up? Contact support@temboo.com and we’ll help you get prompting as quickly as possible.