I plan to write several articles on the core concepts of firmware development and move into more advanced topics. For the simple concepts I will probably be mostly referring to AVR processors due to Atmel’s freely available toolchain and their common use in Arduino designs. As I move into the more advanced concepts I will probably move on to other processors including various ARM processors.
Planned Core Concepts
- Micro-controller Architectures
- Assembly and C Compilers
- Registers
- Common Peripherals
- Interrupts
Planned Advanced Topics
- Direct Memory Access
- Asynchronous Programming
- Real Time Operating Systems
- Power Management
- Fixed Point Math
There are plenty of other resources for getting started with micro-controller programming for all kinds of chips, so I plan to skip any kind of introduction to coding in C and examples on getting started with a particular micro-controller. Instead I will mainly be going into the theory of operation on these topics in the hope that with that knowledge it will be easier to take the examples available in the wild and tame them to your needs. The intended audience is expected to have a software engineering background.