Discovering Tiny Snakes
Being an embedded developer requires a solid grounding in C. However this results in a lot of time-consuming effort setting up build environments, compiling, figuring out how to upload things and a whole myriad of problems that tend to take far more time than you’d expect to get from opening the packaging on your new MCU to getting an LED blinking. There are some more recent alternatives for some of the larger MCUs available. Things like eLua, MicroPython, and CircuitPython can now be loaded and allow you to control an MCU directly, without the need to re-compile to try something new. This will take users through replacing the firmware on an MCU, and get through poking at several sensors, and output systems, with the intention of contrasting the experience to how more traditional embedded is done.
John Hawley
Open Source Developer, VMwarehttps://www.vmware.com/@warty9
John ‘Warthog9’ Hawley led the system administration team on kernel.org for nearly a decade, leading a team including four other administrators. His other exploits include working on Syslinux, OpenSSI, a caching Gitweb, and patches to bind to enable GeoDNS. He’s the author of PXE Knife, a set of interfaces around common utilities and diagnostics tools needed by an average systems administrator, as well as SyncDiff(erent) a state-full file synchronizer and file transfer mechanism. He currently works for VMware working on upstream Open Source Software. In his free time he enjoys cooking extravagant meals and watching bad movies.
