Writing Maintainable Firmware for Real Embedded Systems
This is the code repository for Embedded C in Practice, published by Packt.
Master Embedded C for microcontroller-based systems. Learn to build maintainable and professional firmware through practical, real-world embedded system design, from hardware interaction to production-ready architectures.
This book takes a hands-on, system-level approach to Embedded C firmware development, focusing on how to design maintainable firmware for real microcontroller-based systems.
The book covers the complete journey from understanding how C code executes on a microcontroller and interacts with hardware, to designing modular drivers and production-oriented firmware architectures.
Key topics include:
- Understand how Embedded C code executes on microcontrollers
- Design maintainable firmware projects
- Apply Embedded C language features effectively
- Implement hardware control through registers and peripherals
- Design reusable and modular drivers
- Develop interrupt-driven and timer-based firmware
- Debug, test and validate firmware on real hardware
- Build reliable and production-ready embedded systems
All of the code is organized into folders by chapter.
Each chapter can contain one or more independent projects. Projects are designed to be built from the command line and, where applicable, flashed directly to the target hardware.
For example:
Embedded-C-In-Practice/
├── README.md
├── requirements.md
│
├── chapter_03/
│ ├── README.md
│ ├── 01-led/
│ └── ...
├── chapter_04/
├── chapter_05/
└── ...
Each project contains the source code and build files required to reproduce the examples.
The development environment and dependencies used throughout the book are documented in REQUIREMENTS.md.
The projects use a minimal bare-metal development environment and intentionally avoid vendor HALs when direct hardware access better supports the concepts covered in the book.
Each chapter contains the projects introduced in that part of the book.
Projects are initially kept self-contained so that they can be built and understood independently. As the book progresses, the firmware architecture evolves together with the concepts introduced in each chapter.
See the README inside each chapter for a brief description of its projects.
Errata and corrections will be documented here as they become available.
The book is available on Amazon.
Leonardo Cavagnis is a Firmware Engineer with over 10 years of experience in embedded systems development. He currently works at Arduino, contributing to the design and development of embedded hardware and software platforms that make electronics and edge AI more accessible.
His expertise spans Embedded C programming, microcontroller architecture, and real-world firmware design across industrial, automotive, and consumer applications.
Alongside his engineering work, he is involved in Developer Relations and contributes to technical communities and educational initiatives focused on sharing practical knowledge in embedded systems.
This repository is licensed under the MIT License.
Copyright (c) 2026 Packt.