Not too long ago, it was sort of a mandatory practice to have an IC (Integrated Circuit) burner (sometimes also called a hardware programmer) at hand if anyone needed to work with microcontrollers. Whereby, the customary practice in the hardware development would be something like writing code in Assembly or C language and generating a binary file. Then giving the binary file to a hardware specific IC programmer software to finally burn the instructions into a given microcontroller installed in a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket of the burner.   IC programmers could either be IC specific, or some better ones supported many different microcontrollers and EEPROMs (Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory). In any case, after programming the device a minimum circuit was patched to supply the microcontroller with power, clock signal through an oscillator circuit, and finally adding a simple reset circuit – all this to just get the program running. And for other...