Not OP, but one thing I found useful when starting out with embedded development was to just get a simple "hello world" sort of program running on bare metal an

Not OP, but one thing I found useful when starting out with embedded development was to just get a simple "hello world" sort of program running on bare metal and printing over serial, and to try to understand what was happening in various places that made my program work (code execution on the microcontroller, sending of data over the serial lines, and so on). Even a straightforward Arduino-based environment [0] is usually enough to get started and begin poking around to see what else is possible! For myself, after getting something simple like the above working, it was a gateway to much more experimentation of further possibilities, and ultimately I ended up making an interactive shell [1][2] with some built-in utilities and text games I also wrote that runs on a variety of AVR microcontrollers (those very same Arduino boards I had when starting out). [0] https://www.arduino.cc/ https://www.arduino.cc/ [1] https://community.atmel.com/projects/avrsysh-systemshell-some-built-utilities-and-some-games https://community.atmel.com/projects/avrsysh-systemshell-som... [2] https://github.com/ls4096/avrsysh https://github.com/ls4096/avrsysh