Pick up a Nucleo or mbed board and make something cool!

That's currently in conflict with my life circumstances ;-)

The number of "projects" I wish I could do sitting on my shelves already surpasses the time I can find to spend on them.

Basically, I want to be paid to "learn," and I think I'll be fair value in a month or two. So the question is how to get there? ;-)

You can do that, or you can choose to exert some control over the process.

That was actually my real point. For many smaller companies, it will. General programming experience plus any honest signal, even small, of low-level qualification will get you attention. We get lots of generalist candidates for our embedded positions and the #1 easiest high-signal filter for us is "how do we know they're actually interested in embedded?" Pass that, and things can open up for you.

I haven't applied for a lower level dev so far, but it gives me some encouragement to maybe try next time I want to switch positions (though I did work or get offers on some embedded dev shops, but on the web side of things).

Just an observation, but I've almost never seen job postings for entry/junior level engineers in the embedded/systems world. Only senior-staff level roles (I get the feeling that a lot of early career talent in these domains is sourced from local university pipelines). This has been my observation across both small companies and large corporations. Are these shops really considering people who's only experience is some contrived side projects at that level?

for which salary tho. just checked a bit the current offers and in my country, senior embedded engineer is 60k€ / year at most, and I saw a fair bit around 40k€...