🌀 strands-nicla

Arduino Nicla (Vision / Sense / Voice) control as a single @tool for Strands Agents.

from strands import Agent
from strands_nicla import nicla

agent = Agent(tools=[nicla])
agent("take a photo with the nicla vision and tell me what you see")

What it does

Nicla Vision runs MicroPython / OpenMV firmware and exposes a USB CDC serial REPL. strands-nicla wraps that REPL into Strands-friendly actions:

Nicla Voice does not. A factory Voice enumerates as a CMSIS-DAP debug probe with a silent CDC port — no REPL, so exec/ls/put time out by design. It is a BLE-gateway device, not a REPL device. See NICLA_VOICE.md.

The tiny necklace (firmware/ + hardware/)

This repo also carries the tiny.technology wearable built on Nicla Vision:

• firmware/ — MicroPython device firmware: first-boot WiFi-AP portal, BLE GATT provisioning (pairs with the tiny iOS/Android apps' Nearby → 💎 "Set up" flow), and the device-node loop (heartbeat + relay poll + commands: photo, detect person, faces FOMO, distance, imu, info — vision models run on-device from the QSPI romfs, ~48ms/inference).
• hardware/ — flash map, measured board geometry, official docs/CAD, and the parametric pendant case (tiny_necklace_case.scad, USB-powered or battery=true LiPo variant), sliced plates for Bambu Lab X2D.
• tests/ — the firmware's pure logic runs under CPython with hardware stubs.

See hardware/README.md for the full device state, provisioning paths, and MicroPython/OpenMV gotchas learned the hard way. Ops rule: reset(hard=True) launches main.py; a soft reset with a terminal attached drops to the REPL. Keep the OpenMV USB volume ejected (diskutil unmount "/Volumes/NO NAME") or macOS will corrupt /flash.

Install

pip install strands-nicla

# or inject into devduck:
pipx inject devduck strands-nicla

Supported boards

• Arduino Nicla Vision — STM32H747 + 2MP cam + mic + IMU + ToF
• Arduino Nicla Sense ME — nRF52832 + BHI260AP + BMM150 + BMP390 + BME688
• Arduino Nicla Voice — nRF52832 + NDP120 + IM69D130 mic + BMI270

All three expose a USB CDC port, but only Nicla Vision answers on it out of the box. Nicla Voice ships as a CMSIS-DAP debug probe (2341:0065) whose CDC port returns nothing — verified on hardware at 9600/115200/921600 with both \r\n and Ctrl-C. It has no WiFi either (nRF52832), so it cannot run the Vision's heartbeat/relay node loop; a phone acts as its BLE gateway. Nicla Sense ME runs MbedOS and can also speak MicroPython via mpremote.

Principles

• Mirror strands-adb / strands-ios action vocabulary where sensible.
• Honest errors — if the board doesn't support an action, say so.
• Vision-first — snapshot returns Converse API image blocks.
• No extra daemons — pure pyserial + MicroPython raw REPL protocol.

Status

v0.1 — alpha. See GOAL.md.