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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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What’s the best path into hardware projects, as a software developer?

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alexkindle profile image
Alex

When in doubt - Arduino! Although it depends a ton on your idea of hardware project. Arduino studio (or whatever it's called) seems pretty beginner-friendly, and if/when you graduate, Atmel Studio is my favorite embedded IDE/platform (and free!).

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Andy Johnson

It's all bits, right? So keep things simple at first. Don't try to reverse engineer the protocol for a proprietary hardware driver first. Blink an LED. Then blink an LED from the internet. I can't count how many times I've pulled my hair out first, and an oscilloscope second. Get a cheap multimeter and poke around the circuit. Arduino is great. But don't neglect old school logic from transistors and ICs.

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Co-op Source

Most of the hw engineers at my company are working w/ FPGAs. There are many dev kits from the FPGA vendors that you can use to control LEDs, displays, memory, sensors, etc. The primary languages they use are Verilog and VHDL so a book on those will be needed to get up to speed... and start thinking in parallel!