Hi to all you backers and supporters!
Thank you again for your continued support for the project. Things are going well, and I promise more updates soon about the production process. However, this week’s update is a little different…

This time, I want to focus on the challenges themselves. The Sword of Secrets was created partly as an educational exercise in embedded systems and cryptography, and it comes right out of the box with a few challenges for you to solve! But you don’t need to wait until the project is finalized. You can start practicing virtually right away (pun intended)!

As part of development, I wanted to add another cool factor. Forking cblohr’s mini-rv32ima emulator and expanding it much further! With both 16-bit and 32-bit instructions, hardware peripherals, and MANY more: I implemented and built the ch32v003 MCU in WebAssembly!

That means the actual firmware that runs on the sword itself can now run fully emulated (well, almost fully…) in your browser! It uses Emscripten to build and run the C-code emulator into WebAssembly and, after a few tweaks (apparently browsers don’t like infinite loops), it works perfectly!

This is your first playable taste of the Sword of Secrets, months before you even hold the hardware in your hands.

You’re more than welcome to try out the first challenge of the Sword of Secrets in the online emulator through the “Virtual Challenge” button on the sword’s website: swordofsecrets.com

So go ahead—fire it up, take on the first challenge, and let’s see who solves it first! ⚔️

More soon!
Gili.