Assembly Language

July 30, 2023

Assembly Language

Recently, on Hackaday, there was a discussion about learning assembly language. I believe it is beneficial. In fact, I believe you don't really know computers at all until you understand them at the assembly language level.

Hackaday: 7-22-2023 Who's afraid of assembly language?
Hackaday: 7-14-23 Assebmly language first or never?

So here is my "tutorial" on learning assembly language, for better or worse. As you will soon learn I am advocating ARM as a first assembly language, and the Pi PICO (RP2040) as the platform for learning it.

Why learn assembly
Why ARM
The Pi Pico
A development system
Who made the Pico?
Pi Pico Hardware
ARM registers
David Welch - Pico bare metal examples

Blink the LED - an actual project

First, do it in C
Now, do it with assembly

Beyond Assembly

It is hard to keep this from becoming a microcontroller tutorial instead of an assembly language tutorial. To some degree this is impossible and maybe it is a good thing if it drifts in that direction. At any rate, I am not going to make myself crazy trying to restrict it only to assembly language programming. What I will do is try to sort of sequester those sorts of topics into this area.

First steps with a Pico
What is where ?
IO in four flavors!

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org