You mentioned ready-made breakout boards in passing, but it seems like buying a board from a vendor like Teensy or Adafruit and using Arduino or PlatformIO would be the most common way to approach this for hobbyists? Certainly there’s no reason to spend $250 when these boards go for $6-30. (Whether an Arduino implementation counts as an OS is debatable, but it does handle booting and some device drivers for you, sort of like MS-DOS did.)
My recent projects have used Raspberry Pi Picos after a friend gave me a few. The most difficult part of getting started was deciding among the many ways of writing a program for it. Settled on this one: https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico
When programming at this level of abstraction, the complexity of 32-bit microcontrollers is hidden and they can be had at similar prices to 8-bit boards, so I don’t see any reason not to use 32-bit MCU’s all the time.
With all that bare metal no libs from the start, I am getting impression you used gcc and some makefile scripts instead of vendor IDE.
If so, I wonder what programming utility have you used - what is st-util for SAMx?
BTW by cheap $15 programmer you mean pickit3 clone?
You mentioned ready-made breakout boards in passing, but it seems like buying a board from a vendor like Teensy or Adafruit and using Arduino or PlatformIO would be the most common way to approach this for hobbyists? Certainly there’s no reason to spend $250 when these boards go for $6-30. (Whether an Arduino implementation counts as an OS is debatable, but it does handle booting and some device drivers for you, sort of like MS-DOS did.)
My recent projects have used Raspberry Pi Picos after a friend gave me a few. The most difficult part of getting started was deciding among the many ways of writing a program for it. Settled on this one: https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico
When programming at this level of abstraction, the complexity of 32-bit microcontrollers is hidden and they can be had at similar prices to 8-bit boards, so I don’t see any reason not to use 32-bit MCU’s all the time.