Embedded systems programming: Part 1

Building websites, mobiles apps and desktop applications is interesting, and can be challenging as well, but still, all these programs mainly run inside your typical hardware devices, such as laptops, PCs and mobile devices, and you have to interact with them using a screen and a keyboard.

But what if you want more than that, what if you want to build your own gaming console, your own coffee machine, or a custom mini-car that can move around inside your house, or even some non conventional crazy hardware that doesn’t even exist yet! and all that using a code you wrote with some features that goes beyond the screen/keyboard interactivity, and then let that code runs freely in the physical world, instead of it being “trapped” inside your PC.

Yes, doing that is possible, more accessible than ever, and many programmers work specifically in these fields, where the code meets the hardware in the lowest levels, and saving every bit of memory is extremely important, and where you talk in Bytes instead of Gigabytes, and where so much magic happens.

In that world, the 32KB fully functional programs tell some scary stories at night about the Chrome monster that consumes many Gigabytes of memory to run, while they can happily run for years using few Kilobytes of memory, on a single battery..

Welcome to the world of Embedded Systems Programming.

Many of us are currently immersed in the world of high level programming with abundance of disk space and memory, that we may mistakenly assume that all the written code ends up as a mobile app, a website or a desktop application, however, there are currently so much code running around you which is hidden in plain sight, running silently and very efficiently, a code that’s available inside your AC, TV, remote control, music player, your smart watch, your car, and in so many more devices all around you.

Building and programming hardware products is one of my passions that I have first-hand experience with, and I would like to take you in a journey to explore that world in a series of posts that I am planning to write, and this is just the first part of it, so buckle up and prepare yourself because we are going downward to the low level of the computing world, and stayed tuned for part 2.