I'm a casual embedded-electronics user at best, most of my projects haven't advanced much past turn a simple servo, light some LEDs, maybe read a sensor and POST to an endpoint. For these tasks, Arduino has been pretty good for me and removed a lot of the complexity. The `setup()` and `loop()` model makes a lot of intuitive sense. That being said, I've spent no small amount of time on `String` vs `char*` (as an inexperienced C/C++ developer) and found the guardrails of the Arduino ecosystem to be very frustrating.
Do you have any recommended resources or additional search terms to explore to learn more about hobbyist-level embedded electronics outside of the Arduino ecosystem? FreeRTOS looks interesting but it seems to add a lot of overhead versus something simple like Arduino. Similarly, I've looked at STM32 programming before but my searches were very generic and the STM ecosystem is massive. Specifically, I was trying to figure out if I could reprogram some old drone flight controllers (equipped an STM32F103CBT6 with a bunch of useful embedded sensors, running old versions of "betaflight") for personal projects but the entrypoint to STM programming (STM32Cube?) and the setup code was considerable.
Do you have any recommended resources or additional search terms to explore to learn more about hobbyist-level embedded electronics outside of the Arduino ecosystem? FreeRTOS looks interesting but it seems to add a lot of overhead versus something simple like Arduino. Similarly, I've looked at STM32 programming before but my searches were very generic and the STM ecosystem is massive. Specifically, I was trying to figure out if I could reprogram some old drone flight controllers (equipped an STM32F103CBT6 with a bunch of useful embedded sensors, running old versions of "betaflight") for personal projects but the entrypoint to STM programming (STM32Cube?) and the setup code was considerable.