How hard is it for a software developer to learn how to program a microcontroller?

Question

I\'m a software developer. I\'ve been programming in high level languages for a few years.

I would like to know, how to take my first step into programming hardware. N

Answer 1

Well, if you want to know what you're doing, you need to understand the assembly language of the processor and the processor's architecture.

You will need to learn C to be competent in microcontrollers. There is no way around that.

There are some VM-level languages on embedded systems. I see the Java out-of-memory exception from time to time on my cell phone(which also helps to give me a strong opinion on VM-level embedded languages).

The ARM has some support for hardware-level Java bytecodes.

Your best bet is to pick up something like the PIC or the Atmel chips and begin hacking with them.

If you want to do it with your existing hardware, get a hypervisor for your PC and begin writing a basic kernel.