Bare-Metal MCU #1 - Intro to registers 

Keep making videos bro. This is one of those rare videos on youtube where a dude explains everything in a "grounds-up". This manner of explanation leaves no holes in understanding and encouraged me to review your video over and over. Keep it up!!

I like programming as close to the metal as possible. GOOD JOB showing this and illustrating why this is superior.

I’ve been using a personal project as an opportunity to learn about Arduinos and the whole design process. Thought I had it all figured out until I tried to transition to the ATTiny85 and was quickly humbled. Your videos are providing the bridge to microcontrollers that I had no idea I needed and I cannot say enough how much I appreciate all of your work. It goes without saying that this step up in understanding is likely what stops most of us from going further with our projects so I can’t imagine how many doors you’ve opened for people. Thank you.

We loved this tutorial so much we featured it in this week's Electromaker show!

Criminally underrated channel this is ☝️🙂Keep up the good work ❤

This is basically a full explanation that’s bridging the gap in my knowledge between circuits and computer programs. I want to let you know how valuable this is to me and, I’m sure, to other people. Thank you for making this.

this guy knows alot, thank you for this amazing information and please continue sharing it

I've watched a ton of git manipulation/register videos lately and this is by FAR the best I have seen. Watch it and save it.

I dont understand how this series has such low views... Those Videos taught me so much! Thanks for that dude!

This was really neat! Been looking for videos that explain how to do this kinda thing for a while now and this was by far the best one, can't wait to watch the rest!

Saved the playlist. Your explanations are super crystal clear. Thanks

I have just started watching this series and am enjoying it. I have been playing with the ESP32 using micropython mainly and have always been curious about digging in deeper. Great Job!

Great presentation and in depth analysis of the necessary elements to understand bare metal programming. Been looking for something to jumpstart my understanding with avr bare metal programming. Even if you applied it for STM32, it's so concise it could be applied to any MCU with the proper study of the datasheet. Well done.

This is high quality stuff Mitch! Thanks for bringing it to us... (rushing away to try the blink example myself)

Man, you're killing it.

This was really easy to understand, well done and thank you for making these videos!

Thx Mitch! I was looking for some Ben Eater style videos about understanding microcontrollers. I think I've found it!

The best explanation I've ever seen , you are best!

Thank you for such detailed information on these avr microcontroller. Excellent content and video quality

Great job, I am really enjoying this series

Thank you, exactly what I needed. Very well explained!

You are SO the best of the best. Perfect explanations

i love this video, it's help me can understand a lot of the information behind the function already have in Arduino. Thanks for this video

Great videos!!! Thanx for your time and effort!!!

Thank you very much, Mitch, awesome, very informative videos!

thanks for this tutorial it teaches people how to do it in the right way

The best video about this on the internet sofar! You are really didactical! Thanks you!

nice work bro. hats off to you.

This vídeo is amazing man!

Hi Mitch, i just want to thank you for helping me out with this video. Well done! I am now able to write the right code for my project :-)

i like this kind of video its low level programming we can understand how mcu working under the hood and our ticket for understand mcu third partly library works

Brilliant video well explained and it works !

Thank you for this amazing content!

Wow, 18x faster with direct access ?? That's an enormous improvement, I shall do that going forward. These videos are really great .

Thanks for the video 👍 Trying to learn bare metal with no previous microcontroller experience

this is amazing! thank you!

Amazing video, thank you very much!!

Thanks a lot man! was looking for this :D

Excellent content ie., Oscilloscope waves (high level vs low level port assessing ) 18x faster than high level Thank you

I realise this is 2 years old now, but a good way to make a "Do nothing" loop is to run the following. __asm__ __volatile__ ("nop \t"); That is an assembly line for no operation (nop) I can't remember what the \t does, but the bit where it says "volatile" means the compiler won't optimise it out. This is what I use for either fault states to entirely halt operation, or for stuff like this where you need it to do nothing while simultaneously keeping the compiler happy that you're actually doing something. This is also the only thing I remembered from my coding course in Uni, and I didn't even remember it, I just copy pasted it from one of my projects for uni.

12:37 He wanted to make it a a BIT longer; however, could not because he wanted to keep it in a BYTE size format. So so so good, how to do you keep a straight face with golden tech puns like that............subscribed (not just for the pun, but it was icing on the cake)

For the Port B segment, might be worth showing where Port B is defined. I can't seem to find it in the headers. I'm told from a Google Search that this is in the avr tool-chain. I would imagine that it's defined with the volatile keyword to tell the compiler that the reads or writes to this value will have side effects not seen by the C code directly and thus can not be optimized out. For the Delay segment, might be worth mentioning that the clock speed is the driver of how fast the system runs. A single instruction takes at least one CPU cycle to complete and is your overall system budget on how many instructions you can do in any given second. With that in mind, a write to a variable takes 1 instruction, a read to a variable that is in the CPU register takes 1 instruction. With the STM8 running at 8MHz it can process 8,000,000 instructions in a given second. The for loop itself is setup (long i = 0) at the setup of the loop and for the purposes of this discussion is meaningless. (1 / 8,000,000 of a second). The execution of the code takes 1 instruction (PORTB = 0), the check takes one instruction (i < 1_000_000), and the increment takes one instruction (i++). One iteration of the loop cycle actually takes 3 instructions, and so each for loop is costing 3,000,001 cycles. The delay it's causing is actually around 3/8th of a second or 375 milliseconds and that is why it's blinking faster than the previous example.

Big show, good job, subscribed and like 1.6K full 😉👍

This is realy realy good example, love it. Maybe I'll be able to do it now, 6 us static output loop. Thank you :-3

awesome!

1:04 nice

Thank you its so interesting ...

This is great! I already learned this stuff in a course at the university a few years ago, but needed a refresher. I always felt that the arduino coding is making things dumber rather than easier. And every time i start working with arduino i feel like im relearning bad habits lol. The easy accessability and price of arduinos is great but why cant we all just learn to code like this?

thank you . this helps

Very nice. Looks like it will soon be time to ditch the IDE entirely and use something like avr-glibc.

great!

Perhaps the port version is only faster because you are setting it equal, but in digit write it is probably doing the |= operator to set and &= to unset the bit, thus requiring more instructions.

Great one thank you, one question why did you leave PORTB=32 and = 0 before the For loop ?

Thank you

I always wondered what magic was going on in that digitalWrite function. turns out it's not so scary after all

Also, any chance you could link the datasheet and other references in the description?

Your explanation and effort is very nice! Also the way you say "delay" is making me feel like you must be playing electric guitar.

I understand the niche of starting at the bottom level in understanding the ATMEGA chips and the Arduino environment - looking under the hood to explain registers, machine code, assembly, and C/C+. And learning to bypass the Arduino libraries at times. Kudos. There is value in that. But what is the reason for aiming to eventually transitioning to the STM8? I could see why someone aiming for large scale manufacturing might want to use the cheapest uC which can handle their task, and the ATMEGA line often isn't that. But for a hobbiest, what advantage is there to (eventually) transitioning to another low level uC with similar capabilities, using a different toolchain and ecosystem to learn? Consider by contrast, say, planning transitioning to the STM32 line, which has some advantages in handling some tasks which the ATMEGA cannot. One option in this case would be using the Arduino ecosystem retargeted for the STM32, so reducing the new learning curve once one is familiar with the ATMEGA (eg: using the Blue Pill devices). Anyway, good presentation. If you wish to share the reasoning behind the intended direction of this series, that would be cool.

I feel like messing with bare metal is kind of an uncanny valley of physicality. Gives me a bit of a thrill.

thanks !

You got another subsicriber ☺️

Correction: The hardware registers used by the Arduino Uno are located on-chip, separate from both RAM and ROM. These registers are used to control the behavior of the microcontroller, including setting pin directions, configuring timers and interrupts, and controlling various peripherals such as the analog-to-digital converter and serial communication ports.

also a program that uses pinMode(), digitalWrite() and delay() takes 1536 bytes of flash and 9 bytes of RAM on my Mega2560, whereas a simple bitwise op function and _delay_ms() from AVR API takes only 304 bytes of flash and 0 bytes of RAM - meaning 5x times memory optimization. So yeah Arduino SDK functions are fine for prototyping, but optimizing for specific MCU pays off by a lot.

Thanks for a very understandable video. Is there a way to enter the port value in binary? IE portb=00100000 instead of portb=32? It would be easier to program multi led blink patterns this way.

Now, to read those one thousand pages of datasheet and see if I can find anything as useful as this...

bro, u r smarter then my lecturer

To be honest watching this video made evrything click. For some reason it made me understand microcontroller programming better.

Great video. Thanks. Actually the sound of your loud typing made me realise how bad mine is! Must learn to type!

At uni their forcing us to program the Arduino board in C rather than in the Arduino language and I can understand why. Thanks alot for the tutorial

Great video! However, the timing calculation in 6:20 is not correct since on left there is assignment-only, and on right it is read-and-assignment operation. These do different things. To make comparison correct, the |= and &= operators should be used on left side instead of the =.

For part around 10:40, you might be able to fool the compiler by including semicolon “;” in your for loop.

thanks

It's worth pointing out that writing to the whole port to change one bit is bad programming. The code below is a better approach, albeit with magic numbers. I left them in so it matched the program in the video, but defining bit 5 with a sensible name such as LED_Pin and using 1

Should have covered or referred to a video on but-masking the registers, but good video.

❤🙌🏾 🎉

In Attiny402, I want to put a delay of 40 seconds. Please suggest using assembly

Hello. often program the microcontrollers. I see bit shift right or left using symbol ">>". why we use it. I am waiting for your response thank you.

Another solution might be to declare the loop variable volatile.

How does the microcontroller know, that DDRB as a variable is actually the register DDRB? Is this information somewhere stored?

good up to the point of delay function. NOP loops are not the way to go, missed opportunity to talk about timers and interrupts

Do you have any examples for the new Arduino Uno R4? ;-)

Will continuously re-writing register wear down the memory? I heard they usually have limited number of read/write.

Question please correct me if i am wrong , by setting DDRB = 32; wouldn't that turn all PORTB# to be as an output ?

In Attiny402, this gives port not declared message. Which files to include ??

Ultimately the code will be compiled to machine code while uploading. Then why the "bare metal" codes are faster?

🎉

Would you consider making a similar bare metal series for ESP32, maybe the esp32-c3 RISC-V uC?

👍

Can you do ESP32 GPIO port manipulation?

where are those special variables defined?

Can you not use hex values instead of decimal values?

Why don't you make i volatile? That should be enough to trick the compiler

i think if you indicate that the variable is volatile, the compiler won't optimize out the loop. for(volatile unsigned i = 0; i

How to adapt this code for esp8266? To win in speed.

Dont you have to give data type when assigning a variable? So shouldnt it be uint32_t PORTB = 32 instead of just PORTB = 32?

I can make it harder, though. This is level 2. In c I can push this with some nice bit wise operations like PORTB = PORTB | (1

so why do we put "32" there I don't get it :/

I think he could've changed the compiler options to -o0 to avoid optimization

I wish u see how the delay function is working , IN ASSEMBLY , that's scary .

Where are definitions? Will this code even compile?