Bare Metal Programming Guide is a tutorial and reference resource for programming ARM microcontrollers without frameworks using GCC and datasheets.
The guide addresses the challenge of understanding microcontroller fundamentals by teaching bare metal programming from first principles. Rather than relying on abstraction layers like Cube, Keil, or Arduino, it explains how to work directly with hardware using a compiler and documentation. This approach builds understanding of how higher-level frameworks operate underneath. The guide progresses through increasingly complex examples, each with complete source code demonstrating core concepts like GPIO control, interrupt handling, UART communication, and networking.
The guide suits developers who want to understand embedded systems at a fundamental level or who need to work on projects where frameworks are unavailable or inappropriate. It is particularly valuable for those maintaining or debugging existing bare metal codebases, or learning how popular embedded frameworks achieve their functionality. The template projects provided cover common use cases: basic LED blinking with debug output, a UART command-line interface with memory inspection, file system operations using littlefs in flash memory, and an embedded web server with a dashboard UI built on the mongoose library. The guide is language-agnostic in its teaching approach but uses C and ARM architectures as the concrete implementation vehicle.
The project maintains documentation in multiple languages and provides working code examples that evolve in complexity throughout the guide. Development activity shows consistent maintenance of the repository with updates to examples and documentation.
