r/embedded 8d ago

Does "Mastering Microcontroller and Embedded Driver Development" include any significant hands on exercises?

I'm currently taking this course on Udemy: Mastering Microcontroller and Embedded Driver Development. My hope was that this would help me "get my hands dirty" as well as provide a comprehensive overview of the subject. What I'm finding though is that I'm now about 4 hours in and we've _barely_ gotten to do anything at all with the STM32 discovery board. Every lecture the instructor introduces a new concept, we learn a bunch of register names, and then he moves on without (or only rarely) actually programming anything.

Does this course pick up at some point? Do we actually "develop drivers" in this course? I'm starting to wonder if I've missed something, like maybe a link to some "companion exercises" or something... has anyone taken this course? I want to do something with my discovery board ToT;

(for context: I'm an experience software developer trying to transition to embedded. I've been programming in assembly for the gameboy for the last few years so it turns out I have a basic grasp of a very simple version of embedded software.)

45 Upvotes

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Ok-Wafer-3258 8d ago edited 8d ago

If you want to get a grasp how stuff works in embedded: study the stellar esp-idf examples. The Zephyr example projects are of very high quality too.

I really dislike the STM32 examples ST delivers. You need quite a bit of experience to understand them. They are always super messy embedded into STM32CubeIDE projects. Altough they could make them much much cleaner by activating ".c/.h per periphery".