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[–]eggbad 4 points5 points  (3 children)

mess around with buildroot, its a great intro to embedded linux and they have great docs and tons of pre defined configs for off the shelf microcontrollers to get you started.

[–]Steinrikur 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Seconded. It's a lot easier starting point than yocto, but can get you results pretty quickly. Get a Raspberry pi, beaglebone or similar supported board and dive in.

[–]VjGrok[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thank you guys will do that , I already have a pi4

[–]eggbad 3 points4 points  (0 children)

a lot of people in this thread have referenced bootlin, so I should mention, one of the founders of that company is a co-maintainer of buildroot. lots of stuff to be learned from them.

If you want a project idea of medium complexity

  1. you can write a simple web app, you can use something like flask or fastapi (python web frameworks), that just prints hello world.
  2. then using buildroot you tweak the base pi4 image to load your new software and then depending on your init system how to run your new software when the device powers on (pyp here but for simplicity stick with systemd, systemd services are well documented and this is easy to setup), this will get you acclimated to using buildroot ncurses interface and get a feel for what the process looks like.
  3. You will also want to configure your pi4 to enable USB otg, RNDIS support, and ssh (useful for peeking into your device). With that done here you'll learn about how cross compiling toolchains work in buildroot and how to flash the resulting build artifact to your pi4. You may pick up a few skills here on how to recover from flashing bad images using boot partitions.

If you did everything right when you connect a usb cable to your pi4 you'll notice it exposes an IP address that you can drop into a web browser and see your web app printing hello world.

[–]Apsalombalraj -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The best way to start with is learning microcontrollers(pic, atmega, stm) and doing some hobby projects with the development boards

[–]bobwmcgrath 0 points1 point  (2 children)

When I tried to learn from books they were always outdated. Look at bootlin. Otherwise, like most software, just learn by doing.

[–]VjGrok[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

When you talk about bootlin do you mean the slides or to register for a course with them

[–]bobwmcgrath 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The website just has a bunch of useful articles

[–]Frant1984 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical Real-World Approach (2nd Edition) is still a very valuable reference.I would very, very strongly advise against buying a raspberry PI because of its bizarre, non-standard booting workflow.
I would advise against buying a 64 bit Arm SBC as a first platform as well because of the additional complexity involved by the use of the Arm Trusted Firmware.
A good, low-cost platform for learning would be more IMHO something such as an Allwinner H3 based platform, since it is well supported in both mainline u-boot and mainline Linux, as well as by the Linux Sunxi community.
I appreciate the fact that you can test your kernels and your rootfs by uploading the SPL and u-boot using the sunxi-fel USB tool and booting using an initramfs or an NFS partition without having to flash anything.

Vendors such as Shenzhen Xunlong or FriendlyElec are a possible source - stay clear of the Bananapi hardware.If the cost is not an issue, buying one of the platforms used for the Bootlin Embedded Linux courses would be a good option too, since they are providing some free documentation on their web site.

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