I’ve just published the TongDou V9 Hardware Test Firmware v1.0.

This is not a cleaned-up demo firmware written for GitHub afterward. It is the same engineering firmware I actually use on my workbench while bringing up, diagnosing, calibrating, repairing, and debugging TongDou V9 hardware.

TongDou V9 hardware diagnostics page running directly on the ESP32-S3 at 192.168.4.1.

The firmware grew together with the hardware, so it still contains traces of the real development process: experimental commands, calibration tools, low-level diagnostics, and a few things that were written simply because I needed to find out why something was not working.

I decided not to clean all of that away before publishing it.

If you are a developer looking through the source, you can see much more clearly what I actually tested and how I worked through the V9 hardware.

It includes things such as:

• OLED and addressable LED testing
• microphone recording and audio loopback
• speaker diagnostics
• battery and power diagnostics
• QMI8658A IMU testing
• capacitive Logo touch testing
• LD2412 presence radar diagnostics and engineering tools
• individual motor testing and driver diagnostics
• motor direction, calibration and saved configuration
• gyroscope-assisted straight-line experiments
• shipping discharge testing
• low-level LED data-pin debugging
• other small workbench tools that accumulated while building V9

There are even a few experiments that are not strictly “hardware tests,” such as gyro-assisted movement and a small Logo-triggered movement experiment. I kept them because they are part of the actual development history.

For people who just want to flash it

I also made a ready-to-use Windows package.

You do not need PlatformIO, Python, or a development environment.

The release ZIP contains a merged full-flash BIN, Espressif’s standalone esptool, and a simple:

FLASH_TONGDOU.bat

The process is basically:

Connect TongDou by USB → double-click FLASH_TONGDOU.bat → wait for SUCCESS.

The tool automatically finds the ESP32-S3 serial port and flashes the complete image from address 0x0.

I tested the exact release ZIP on a real TongDou V9 before publishing it: the firmware flashed successfully, rebooted normally, the TongDou-BoardTest Wi-Fi access point came up, the web diagnostics page opened at 192.168.4.1, and the hardware tests worked normally.

Source code

The source is now in the main TongDou repository:

TongDou V9 Hardware Test Firmware
https://github.com/solitary-dev-50/tongdou/tree/main/hardware_test_firmware

The ready-to-flash v1.0 package is here:

TongDou V9 Hardware Test Firmware v1.0 Release
https://github.com/solitary-dev-50/tongdou/releases/tag/hardware-test-v1.0

Please follow the repository if you’d like to keep up with the project. I update it regularly as TongDou continues to develop.

One warning: this is engineering firmware. Some commands can move the motors, save persistent settings, change LD2412 radar parameters, or intentionally discharge the battery. Read the documentation before experimenting with the more advanced commands.

This is not the TongDou demo firmware, and it is not the final TongDou application firmware.

It is the workbench layer underneath them — the stuff I used to make sure the hardware actually worked.