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Ironically, I've been feeling the opposite lately- my day job is embedded, and I was reminiscing about my childhood days when I was learning to code with Scheme and Processing. There's something beautiful about a single laptop being a fully enclosed ecosystem to just play around with pure code, and I basically haven't coded for fun in my free time in a few years. I was even considering trying to learn some webdev to make my own personal site. :P I still love embedded, and I think it's great for all the reasons mentioned in the thread. As for your question, firmware is quite broad, and there are lots of different routes people take to break into it as a career. At its core, it's a lot of writing systems code, or feature code that runs on constrained systems. Something like CS undergrad systems programming + OS or equivalent should be enough. After that, I would make sure you have decent breadth: knowing how to read datasheets, bringing up parts, writing a linker script, using peripherals, grokking some standard protocols like I2C/SPI/SDIO, basic circuits knowledge, basic comparch knowledge, etc. The nice part of all this stuff is that you can totally get there with just hobby projects and Adafruit boards. If you find yourself using the batteries included in the Arduino or Adafruit libraries, maybe push yourself to write more of it from scratch. eg. write an SDIO driver to read from an SD card and parse a FAT filesystem. People with solid software engineering backgrounds are pretty valuable in embedded, so I'd emphasize that as well. Knowing that git exists, unit tests, API design, CI tooling, etc. If you're a Linux kernel hacker, embedded linux is also kind of its own separate world, so that might be a good direction if you have experience there. |