Firmware ↔ ROS 2 bridge · STM32 · Jetson · 14 weeks
The bridge between hardware and software in modern robots. 14-week path covering bare-metal C, RTOS, hardware interfaces, and the integration patterns that link a microcontroller to a ROS 2 stack.
The language and the hardware-near patterns.
Past K&R — restrict, _Generic, stdatomic, alignment.
Embedded C is still mostly C99 with some C11 idioms creeping in. Learn the modern bits.
Volatile, alignment, endianness, packed structs.
These bite junior engineers constantly. Get fluent.
The skill no university teaches.
STM32 reference manuals are 1500+ pages. You don't read them cover to cover; you learn to navigate them.
STM32, GPIO, ADC, PWM, timers, interrupts.
Blink an LED, then drive a sensor over I2C.
The hardware-store hello world. Do it; understand it; move on.
How modern embedded does I/O without busy-waiting.
Polling-only embedded is amateur. Interrupt + DMA is the production pattern.
How sensors and motor drivers actually talk.
CAN especially — used in every drone, every car, every industrial robot.
FreeRTOS, Zephyr — when bare-metal is not enough.
Tasks, semaphores, queues, priorities.
Most heavily-used RTOS in robotics. Learn it; Zephyr ports the concepts.
The newer, more device-tree-driven RTOS gaining ground.
Used in many recent robots — Boston Dynamics, several drone companies. Worth being fluent.
Latency, jitter, priority inversion. Why your 1kHz control loop sometimes misses deadlines.
These are the senior-IC questions in any embedded interview.
micro-ROS, Jetson, motor drivers, safety.
Run ROS 2 nodes on a microcontroller.
The clean modern integration path between MCU firmware and ROS 2 nav stacks.
Linux on the Jetson, MCU for low-level control. The standard architecture.
This split — Linux for ML, MCU for real-time — defines modern robot architecture.
BLDC motors, FOC control, ESCs.
For aerial, ground, and many manipulators. SimpleFOC is the open-source learning aid.
How a microcontroller fails safely when something goes wrong.
Robots can hurt people. Watchdog timers, redundant sensors, fail-safe state are senior-engineer differentiators.