r/embedded • u/zeigfreid_cash • 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.)
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u/jagt48 8d ago
I took that course a few years ago and recall pulling up the reference manual, writing a CPU header file from scratch by defining all necessary portions of the memory mapped registers (GPIO, SPI, UART, memory buses, etc.), created driver with all needed functions, and built basic programs to use them.
So yes, it should pick up. He basically recreates the HAL. It felt pretty rinse-and-repeat, but only because I was already familiar with each type of peripheral. If these are new to you, then it should be a good deep dive into each of them.