Tag: stm32

An updated version of my previous post on Rust on the STM32F1 I plan to make more shorter and more modular posts, but to get started, here is a short tutorial on how to get started: Blink an LED in Rust on a cheap microcontroller.

I’m new to rust and new to embedded programming. I wanted to document my experience getting started. This started when I bought an Arduino kit to do some projects with my family while we’re stuck inside avoiding the pandemic.

During this time I also started learning the rust programming language. Rust can be used for embedded programming, but unfortunately the Arduino Uno that I had wasn’t really supported as a compilation target from rust. This compatibility issue stems from the AVR microcontroller used on the Uno.

In the end I decided to purchase a new, and cheap, STM32 based board with good support from the Rust embedded community.

I wanted to learn embedded programming with Rust, so I made this little project. It's a battery powered pocket sized video game. The idea of the game is to be ridiculously small. It's played by two players each grabbing one end of the board. I’ve programmed two games for it: pong and tetris.

If this isn't your first time visiting my blog, you may recall that I've spent the past several years building an elaborate microcontroller graphics demo using C++.

Over the past few months, I've been rewriting it — in Rust.

This is an interesting test case for Rust, because we're very much in C/C++'s home court here: the demo runs on the bare metal, without an operating system, and is very sensitive to both CPU timing and memory usage.

The results so far? The Rust implementation is simpler, shorter (in lines of code), faster, and smaller (in bytes of Flash) than my heavily-optimized C++ version — and because it's almost entirely safe code, several types of bugs that I fought regularly, such as race conditions and dangling pointers, are now caught by the compiler.

It's fantastic. Read on for my notes on the process.

The embedded Rust development ecosystem is changing fast. A bunch has changed even since early 2019 when I started prototyping firmware for the Gameslab’s system controller (STM32L0). Most of the changes are incredible! Device support crates, hardware abstraction layers (HALs), and even USB support are all very usable now for Cortex-M devices. In this post, I’ll summarize the ecosystem and show how to get started with embedded Rust on a STM32L0 part.