Blogs by Dion

I've previously explained async bloat and some work-arounds for it, but would much prefer to solve the issue at the root, in the compiler. I've submitted a Project Goal, and am looking for help to fund the effort.

Async Rust is amazing, but far from flawless. In this blog, I'll walk you through the current struggles and possible solutions.

By now, we all know Rust works pretty well on embedded. What's lesser known is how Rust handles real-time requirements. We occasionally get questions about this and so I took that as an opportunity to write about it!

This article is a linear retrospective of how we searched for and eventually fixed a hard-to-find bug in our embedded software. If you're only interested in the outcome, then make sure to read the last three sections.

In my job I get to speak to lots of people about Rust. Some are just starting out, some have barely ever heard of it, and then some people are running Rust silently in production at a very large company in a very serious product.

While using a full-blown filesystem for storing your data in non-volatile memory is common practice, those filesystems are often too big, not to mention annoying to use, for the things I want to do. My solution?

I've been hard at work creating the sequential-storage crate. In this blog post I'd like to go over what it is, why I created it and what it does.

At Tweede golf we're big fans of creating applications on embedded devices with Rust and we've written a lot about it.

But if you're a hardware vendor (be it chips or full devices/systems), should you give your users Rust support in addition to your C support?

In this blog I argue that the answer to the question is yes.

About one year ago, Tweede Golf announced "Statime", a Rust implementation of the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). The result of that first phase was a working proof of concept. Quite a bit has changed since then.

Rust is maturing and every year more software is being made with it. In fact, Rust can be used as a competitor to C. In this article I will argue that this is now also the case for embedded Rust!

NLR, Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre, invited embedded lead Dion to explain the benefits of programming in Rust to the company.

TrustZone-m is a technology by ARM that allows you to create a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in your software. You can use it for example to keep your encryption keys secret or to separate a big vulnerable networking stack from your own code.

Over the last three months I've been working on a set of crates (Rust libraries) with the aim of making the usage of TrustZone-m a lot easier.

Imagine you've just deployed an embedded device in the world and of course, you have tested it thoroughly and it works. To monitor the device, you've set up some logging.

During the Rust meetup titled "Run Rust Anywhere" in Utrecht, August 2022, Dion talked about his Embedded Rust work.

For the last couple of months, we've been working on a Rust implementation of the Precision Time Protocol called Statime ("statim" is Latin for immediately), and we're proud to announce the completion of the first phase of the project.

It is no secret that we at Tweede golf love Embedded Rust, you can read about it in our other blog posts. But we thought it'd be fun to hear from the community too!

It's time for another technical blog post about async Rust on embedded. This time we're going to pitch Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C on an STM32F446 microcontroller.

Let me introduce myself, I'm Dion Dokter, 24 years old (as of writing) and the newest member at Tweede golf (TG). I've always been into computers and started writing desktop software and games in 2013, embedded software in 2015, and started with Rust in 2019.