Thanks @edouard for the unpaid advertisement – will refer with a good recommendation if you apply to Ledger 
Vanadium is still at a highly prototypal/experimental stage, and it’s a long road to bring it to production. I’m hoping for something reasonably developer-ready by Q4.
The promise is to mostly abstract away the limitations of embedded programming (including the platform quirks that different embedded toolchains/hardware inevitably have).
I presented the project at Baltic Honeybadger 2023, but unfortunately it’s not recorded. For anyone who’s interested:
- Here are the slides of the BH23 presentation
- And here is an earlier blog post from the developer of the initial prototype.
Running a project like VLS for a low-volume lightning node is definitely within the realm of feasibility; more broadly, so are all applications that sound like “build your own cheap HSM for personal security”.
Of course, running a high-volume routing lightning node is not going to be feasible at scale, for limitations of the hardware, rather than of the VM.