Nine focused technical pathways

Who it is for

Learners who can program but have never had their C reviewed by an embedded engineer.

Prerequisite

Basic programming experience

What it covers

• Pointers, memory layout, storage duration and undefined behaviour
• const, volatile and optimisation interactions
• Bit manipulation and register access patterns
• Compilation, linking, map files and startup code
• Layered driver design, state machines and unit testing

Typical projects

• Peripheral driver library
• Memory-layout explorer
• Documented utility library with tests

Who it is for

Engineers who use HAL functions but cannot explain what happens underneath.

Prerequisite

Comfortable with C and basic electronics

What it covers

• Cortex-M exceptions, faults and the NVIC
• Memory-mapped peripherals and register-level drivers
• Clock trees, timers, ADC, PWM and DMA
• Linker scripts, startup code and map-file analysis
• Debug probes, hard-fault analysis and trace

Typical projects

• Register-level peripheral driver set
• Hard-fault post-mortem
• Low-power sensor node

Who it is for

Firmware engineers who have written tasks but cannot yet justify their design under load.

Prerequisite

Solid C plus microcontroller fundamentals

What it covers

• Scheduling, priorities and context switching
• Queues, mutexes, semaphores, event groups and task notifications
• Interrupt-safe APIs and deferred processing
• Priority inversion, deadlock, starvation and stack sizing
• Watchdogs, CPU-load analysis and tracing

Typical projects

• Multi-task controller with queue IPC
• Priority-inversion case study
• Watchdog root-cause investigation

Who it is for

Engineers moving from bare-metal to Linux platforms or targeting BSP roles.

Prerequisite

Strong C, comfort with the Linux command line

What it covers

• Boot process, U-Boot and kernel command line
• Cross-compilation, sysroots and toolchains
• Kernel modules, device trees and bindings
• Character device drivers and driver debugging
• Buildroot and Yocto image construction

Typical projects

• Character driver with ioctl interface
• Device-tree integration
• Custom Buildroot image

Who it is for

Engineers targeting automotive OEM, tier-1 and engineering-services roles.

Prerequisite

C, microcontrollers and RTOS fundamentals

What it covers

• ECU categories, domain and zonal architecture trends
• CAN, CAN FD, LIN and automotive Ethernet awareness
• AUTOSAR layering concepts
• Functional safety fundamentals (ISO 26262 intent)
• Automotive cybersecurity awareness

Typical projects

• ECU simulation and test rig
• Gateway message routing exercise
• Safety-case note for a feature

Who it is for

Test, validation and diagnostics engineers who need hands-on protocol depth.

Prerequisite

Basic embedded C; automotive background helpful but not required

What it covers

• CAN framing, arbitration, filters and error states
• CAN FD payloads and bit-rate switching
• ISO-TP multi-frame transfer
• UDS services: sessions, DTC read/clear, routine control
• Diagnostic test-case design

Typical projects

• CAN data logger
• UDS-driven configuration interface
• Fault-injection test suite

Who it is for

Engineers building connected products who need reliability, not just a demo.

Prerequisite

Microcontroller fundamentals and basic networking concepts

What it covers

• TCP/IP, sockets and connection lifecycle
• MQTT and CoAP in depth
• Provisioning, identity and onboarding
• Telemetry design, back-off and offline tolerance
• OTA updates, rollback and security fundamentals

Typical projects

• Telemetry pipeline with outage recovery
• Provisioning flow
• Safe OTA update mechanism

Who it is for

Embedded engineers who want to add ML without becoming data scientists.

Prerequisite

Solid firmware skills plus basic Python

What it covers

• Framing sensor problems as ML tasks
• Data collection, windowing and preprocessing on device
• Model selection, evaluation and avoiding data leakage
• Integration of inference with RTOS tasks and drivers
• System-level testing of an intelligent feature

Typical projects

• Sensor classification in firmware
• Streaming inference pipeline
• Model-ablation study

Who it is for

Engineers who want to deploy models under real RAM, latency and power limits.

Prerequisite

Embedded C and firmware development; introductory ML helpful

What it covers

• TinyML runtimes and model representation
• Post-training quantisation and accuracy trade-offs
• Arena allocation and RAM/flash budgeting
• Latency and power measurement methodology
• Anomaly detection and drift on device

Typical projects

• Quantised classifier deployment
• Vibration anomaly detector
• Latency/accuracy budget report