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How Long It Actually Takes to Become Productive with a New Microcontroller
Why This Question Keeps Coming Up One question I hear from firmware engineers (and one that I often ask myself) is: “How long should it take to get productive on a new microcontroller?” The frustration behind that question is usually familiar: you understand the basics of controlling GPIO, writing to registers, scheduling interrupts, DMA, RTOS,…
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Building in the Gaps: Lessons from an Apple Firmware Engineer
Parth Thakkar’s journey is a reminder that landing a coveted engineering job at a renowned hardware company isn’t built on credentials alone. It’s built on curiosity, persistence, and an almost stubborn commitment to learning by doing. Today, Parth is a HID Firmware Engineer at Apple, working on the embedded code that powers the next generation…
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State of Edge AI on Microcontrollers in 2026
Over the past couple of years, edge AI on microcontrollers (often called “TinyML”) has evolved beyond demos and conference talks. You can now find professional tools, workflows, and design patterns used to ship real products. While this progress has not seen the explosive visibility of other cloud AI paradigms (e.g. large language models), the embedded…
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An Ode to FatFs
There are open-source projects that get attention because they’re new, flashy, or disruptive. And then there are projects that earn their place by simply working quietly in the background until they become part of the embedded landscape itself. Elm-Chan’s FatFs falls squarely into the second category. If you’ve ever logged data to an SD card,…
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Zephyr vs FreeRTOS: How to Choose the Right RTOS for Your Embedded Project
Every time I mention Zephyr, I inevitably get a few responses along the lines of “just use FreeRTOS.” I admit, FreeRTOS is amazing, but it might not be the right tool for the job. In the rest of the post, I’ll analyze each to hopefully help give you a better idea of what kinds of…
