My ask: are there any good resources on how to get started in this space? I've got some tools and medium level programming skills but would love to get recs on Youtube channels, forums, or other resources.
Thanks in advance
Since a couple folks have mentioned arduinos, I would check out https://www.youtube.com/@paulmcwhorter he has an arduino tutorial. My best advice is to just grab the kit he's using and jump right in. His method of teaching is step 1 to step 100 kind of teaching. So you with some tools and medium level prog skills, should be able to watch the videos in a faster speed.
This is his amazon ref link from his video. The kit is also on sale right now. https://www.amazon.com/EL-KIT-001-Project-Complete-Starter-T...
https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us/products/plasma-2040
https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/tree/main/micropyt...
For programming MCU I like two levels, one is knowing the very low level, what is the first instruction the cpu runs. That implied understanding linker scripts and a bit of assembly and vector table (this applies to ARM, is not complicated and I had tons of fun learning this!) For this you can get a debugger with SWD, pick a manufacturer (there’s TONs of stuff for stm32, just google stm32 bare metal!) and have fun!
The other level that I like is to just pick a feather from Ada fruit, install circuit Python, a few libraries, and I’m off to the races. I enjoyed that also (made a little buzzer that played the correct tone based on MIDI from my keyboard)
I quite enjoyed that too but there were a lot of layers that I didn’t understand, I just accepted that an MCU can run Python… but I like understanding!
Above all tho, have fun!
You're going to get a ton of answers from people that point you at all kinds of different boards and hardware to learn from, but IMHO nothing is as well documented and easily available as classic Arduino hardware (like the Arduino Uno) and its ecosystem of libraries and programs/sketches. Everything you learn from Arduino will help you the further you get into embedded programming and hardware fun.
Both have lots of tutorials around all sorts of "programmable gadget" kinds of things. Now to be fair, both sites are somewhat centered on products that they sell, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Adafruit has great tutorials and once you get everything wired up, any professional developer won't have any trouble getting it working.