Set up Ferqon with a Raspberry Pi and an STM32 in 20 minutes
A hands on tutorial for building a self hosted hardware test bench with a Raspberry Pi, an STM32 development board, and Ferqon Server.
August 3, 2026 · Alejandro Ramirez
You do not need a server rack to start automating hardware tests. A Raspberry Pi, an STM32 board, and a USB cable are enough to run a real Ferqon pipeline.
This tutorial walks through the setup from a blank SD card to a passing test run.
What you need
- A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with a 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS image
- An STM32 Nucleo or Blue Pill board with a working USB cable
- A laptop on the same network as the Pi
- About 20 minutes
Step 1. Install Ferqon Server on the Pi
Flash Raspberry Pi OS Lite to your SD card, enable SSH, and boot the Pi. Then install the Ferqon Server package from the apt repository:
curl -fsSL https://apt.revyrlabs.com/setup.sh | bash
sudo apt install ferqon-server
sudo systemctl enable --now ferqon-server
The server listens on port 8080 by default. Open http://<pi-ip>:8080 from your laptop to see the dashboard.
Step 2. Connect the STM32 board
Plug the Nucleo into the Pi over USB. Ferqon reads the board profile from the onboard ST-Link interface and auto selects the correct flashing and serial settings.
In the dashboard, go to Devices and confirm the board appears as ready. If it does not, check that the ferqon user is in the dialout and plugdev groups.
Step 3. Create a pipeline
Create ferqon.yaml in your firmware project on the Pi:
stages:
- build
- flash
- test
device: auto
target: ./firmware.elf
Run it from the project directory:
ferqon run
Ferqon builds your project, flashes the STM32, and runs the tests in the pipeline. The output looks like this:
[build] OK 2.1s
[flash] OK 4.3s
[test] PASS 6 of 6 0 skipped 0 failed
Step 4. Add it to CI
Once the local run works, commit ferqon.yaml and add a GitHub Actions job that sends the build to your Ferqon Server. Because the server is on your network, the firmware is never uploaded to a cloud service.
What is next
Add more boards to the same server, define per project runbooks, and invite the rest of the team to the web IDE. The free tier covers one active server, so this exact setup costs nothing.
Create your free account and Ferqon will provision a license automatically.