Hardware programming?

assembly, embedded programming, j2me.
google those.

actually, i'll put it this way. depending on the device those are normally your 3 choices. for pdas, phones, j2me should be fine. older phones and pda you might have to go with assembly or c.

then again i'm no expert.

That's far too broad a question really. Those things cover such a vast variety of methods. Generally the smaller the thing, the more likely that ASM will be the language used, and the smaller the native integer size, and addressing mode. Whilst the larger and more powerful the thing, the more likely C/C++ or other higher-level languages are used.
Whilst a console may used 64-bit programming, PC's use mostly 32/64bit, smaller devices tend to use 16/32 bit addressing, and smaller things still may use 8-bit, or anything between 8 & 16-bit I guess. I've worked on a device that used both 16 and 32-bit addressing although there were only 20 address lines that could be used (1MB) except that we packed 4MB into the thing and manually toggled some other micro outputs in order to select the other RAM chips (a bit nasty in other words).
When you get down to the smaller devices, the programming gets very specific, with low level things like directly setting the pins on the micro low or high, and writing interrupt routines and watchdogs etc.

Can you ask about anything more specific? languages used/compilers/the actual interaction between the software and the hardware, specific devices...

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Original post by Undeadlnsanity This is just for educational purpouses, but I'm wondering, how would I go about programming for hardware. E.G. Things such as electronic watches, games on a small console type thing, controls for a car radio on so on. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

At my education (Technical Computer Science) we learn to program and use micro-controllers and processors. For the microcontroller you could take the Atmel for example, its quiet small so easy to overview. What you first do is program functions that do parts of the entire hardware should do. After you are through this fase you can consider to bake it into one chip.

But to answer your question shallowly: Program some code, compile it with a microcontroller specific compiler, use a program to store the hex (compiler output) in to the controllers memory.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster http://www.parallax.com/

Last time I used them, they were horribly overpriced. PICAXE is a much cheaper solution.

Thanks for your help everyone.