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copied!<p>I have been coding in C both as a hobby and professionally for about 16 years now, but always for userland code (i.e., programs, not kernel or drivers). Most of my jobs involved high level languages (I have done <strong>a lot</strong> of Perl and Ruby programming, with the occasional Java, Python and shell scripting in between). I did develop a lot for MS-DOS (which was probably as close to bare-metal programming as you would get on a x86 machine), but my last job involved 5 years of Perl and Ruby on Rails web development.</p> <p>That being said, I am now a senior engineer for embedded Linux development, developing drivers (including an emulator for a legacy simple microprocessor inside a kernel module) for <a href="http://www.uclinux.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">uClinux</a> on the <a href="http://www.analog.com/en/embedded-processing-dsp/blackfin/processors/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Blackfin</a> platform. There are times when my inexperience with hardware related issues (i.e., floating signal levels due to lack of a pull-up/pull-down on a pin) did get in the way, but it has been mostly a highly enjoyable and thrilling experience. As stated by others, understanding your tools is essential -- for uClinux, that meant the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_toolchain" rel="nofollow noreferrer">GNU Toolchain</a>, which fortunately I was already familiar with due to my background on FOSS technologies.</p> <p>The Blackfin is hardly an entry-level microprocessor (in particular, it does not have a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MMU</a>, which has some <a href="http://www.embedded.com/story/OEG20020212S0014" rel="nofollow noreferrer">relevant effects on Linux development</a>), but as already stated, you can buy a <a href="http://dkc1.digikey.com/us/en/mkt/beagleboard.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Beagleboard</a> for around US$200 with all required accessories and start messing around with it in just a few days. If you want something simpler, there are many <a href="http://www.arduino.cc/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Arduino</a> options out there, though if you have some real development experience under your belt I believe you will find their development environment a little limiting (I know I did).</p> <p>After you get comfortable with your tools you might want to spend some money on an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-circuit_emulator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">in-circuit emulator</a> (or ICE). These are usually highly platform specific (both in terms of target architecture and development environment), but are highly recommended for anything beyond the usual blink-LEDs-after-button-press examples I am sure you will quickly outgrow.</p> <p>In few months you will find yourself building custom images for <a href="http://www.linuxfordevices.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">hackable customer devices</a> using <a href="http://buildroot.uclibc.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Buildroot</a> and having a lot of fun. All I can say is, go for it, it's highly addictive and not particularly expensive to do nowadays.</p>

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