Rust Daily Learning - Day 24

• Overview
• Setting up the Environment
• Creating a Project
• Interacting with the Board
• Compiling and Deploying
• Conclusion

  Overview

Rust’s emphasis on safety and low-level control makes it well-suited for embedded development. In today’s Rust daily learning series, we’ll introduce you to embedded development with Rust and cover some important topics to get started.

Setting up the Environment

To get started with embedded development in Rust, you’ll need to set up your development environment with the following tools:

• A Rust installation
• An embedded development board or emulator
• A toolchain for your board’s microcontroller architecture
• An IDE or editor with Rust support

There are several popular boards for embedded development with Rust, such as the STM32F3DISCOVERY, the STM32F4DISCOVERY, the Raspberry Pi, and the Arduino Due. Each board has its own toolchain, which includes a compiler, linker, and debugger.

Creating a Project

Once you’ve set up your environment, you can create a new Rust project for your board. You can use Cargo, Rust’s package manager and build tool, to create a new project with the following command:

cargo new --bin my_board

This creates a new Rust project with a binary target. You can edit the src/main.rs file to write your Rust code.

Interacting with the Board

To interact with your board, you’ll need to use one of the available Rust libraries for your board’s microcontroller architecture. There are several popular libraries for embedded development with Rust, such as cortex-m, stm32f4xx-hal, and embedded-hal.

The cortex-m library provides low-level access to the ARM Cortex-M processor, which is used by many microcontrollers. The stm32f4xx-hal library provides a high-level interface to the STM32F4 microcontroller family, which is used in the STM32F4DISCOVERY board. The embedded-hal library provides a common interface for interacting with various microcontrollers, and supports many different architectures.

Compiling and Deploying

Once you’ve written your Rust code and added the necessary libraries, you can compile and deploy your code to the board. To do this, you’ll need to use a tool like cargo-embed, which compiles your code and deploys it to the board over a debug interface.

To use cargo-embed, add the following lines to your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
cortex-m = "0.6.2"
cortex-m-rt = "0.6.13"
panic-halt = "0.2.0"

And then run the following command:

cargo embed --release

This command will compile your code in release mode and deploy it to the board over the debug interface.

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s lesson on embedded development with Rust. Keep experimenting with embedded Rust and explore how you can use it to build safe and reliable embedded systems. Happy coding!