I miss doing fun little projects with atmel MCUs. They were easy to get started with using either arduino or C. I often found myself blogging or documenting my projects just like this, which is funny since it wasn’t “work.”

Then at some point I got too busy with work (and a kid) so I stopped messing around with them.

I didn’t realize how helpful learning low level I/O design and implementation was to my current job (control systems) until much later on. I’m pretty confident my hobbying helped me understand design decisions for the software that we worked in for my day job. Types, and more importantly type casting, was relatively ubiquitous in MCU programming. The software we used in my day job casted all types implicitly. So many times when we found a bug in that software it was due to some casting issue. Granted I was implementing “code” in that platform, but not a software engineer, so it was funny having relatively deep technical conversations with the software engineers when we had to engage them.