You can probably eyeball it to perfection on the first or second iteration. Again, appropriate technology is the watchword. You can often bring up a microcontroller-based design without a logic analyzer, since there's no bus to watch. Some people even replace the scope with nothing more than a logic probe. An army of tool vendors supply very low cost solutions to deal with the particular problems posed by microcontrollers.
Some companies cater especially to the low-end.
Most do a great job, despite the low cost. I recently looked at Byte Craft's array of compilers for microcontrollers from Microchip, Motorola, and National. Despite the limited address spaces of some of these parts, it's clear a decent C compiler can produce very efficient code. Working in a shop using mostly mid-range processors, I'm amazed at the amount of fancy equipment we rely on, and am sometimes a bit wistful for those days of operating out of a garage with not much more than a soldering iron, logic probe, and a thinking cap. Back to home page.