Ever since I started programming microcontrollers, I have almost exclusively done so using a vendor-provided (usually Eclipse-based) IDE, which does a lot of stuff automagically behind the scenes. But since I like to know how stuff works I figured I would ditch the IDE and try starting from scratch. In this blog post series I am going to go back to basics and explore how to program an STM32 microcontroller, starting as simple as possible and then gradually adding more and more stuff along the way. In this first post I am going to start off with nothing more than an editor and the command-line.