> how would I go about make the board?

First, make a schematic. This covers which things are electrically connected together so it's easier to see what connections there are. There's always "boilerplate" circuitry, so you'll want to start with an existing schematic. Eg https://stm32-base.org/assets/pdf/boards/original-schematic-...

Then you design the board. You take the schematic, and then actually draw the actual wires (traces) on a board, and tell it which parts go where. The output from this step is a series of Gerber files. They look something like https://info.ewmfg.com/hubfs/Gerber-file-East-West-MFG.png

Finally, you send the board files off to a fab for them to make the board, and optionally solder all the parts on. You used to be able to make it yourself but these days, a pcb house, or manufacturing facility is the way to go.

KiCad is the preferred hobbyist software package these days.

/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/ has some good resources for this process.

> How do you program the chip?

These days, via USB. Circuitry is so cheap these days that the easiest thing to do is have a USB port, and a 'program' button, so when you hold the button down, and power up the device, it boots into a special mode where it can be programmed. There are other techniques but they're mostly harder.

Back in the day, you would have a chip programming device where you would burn the code into a chip, and then have to physically put that chip into your circuit. In order to erase it, you would need to uncover a hole in the top of the chip, and then shine UV light on it.

> How can you test your board?

Depending on the level of debugging you need, a multimeter, a oscilloscope or a digital logic analyzer, in addition to printf debugging and using a debugger, possibly via JTAG.

A multimeter is good enough for simple low/high testing. Like why is this single LED not on, it should be one.

An oscilloscope is useful for graphing simple signals that a multimeter can't catch. If you're turning the LED on and off 50 times a second, it'll be dimmer than if it's just on the whole time (PWM), and an oscope is good for looking at those 50 times.

Finally, a digital logic analyzer. If you're using a bus, like I²C or SPI, and are sending bytes and bytes of data, you can read those off an oscilloscope; low, high, low low is a 4, but that gets old real quick. A digital logic analyzer will interpret the signals on the wire and just tell you the bytes.

Most chips will have a serial port so you can do printf/console.log-grade debugging. You may need additional circuitry to talk to this port, or it may happen over USB.

Finally some microcontrollers support in-circuit emulation (ICE) debugging methods. The two big ones are JTAG and SWE. These let you connect your computer to the microcontroller, and then step through your code, line by line, using a debugger.

> How can you prototype on an arduino, if you'll use different architecture STM vs Atmega, etc...

To be clear, that's not recommended. You're writing in C, not assembly so the code you write is largely portable, so it's just a matter of copying your code to a different configuration, updating the code that interacts with the chip's hardware, and then recompiling.

Updating the code may or may not be trivial though. And personally it's not especially fun. I'd just use the same chip for prototyping as I'd want in my production run. If you have your heart set on using an STM32, just use a dev kits for that to prototype with eg https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic... instead of an Arudino.

And of course, these days, and on the linked article, you can program in MicroPython instead of C, which is easier.