Blog

Tech blog on web, security & embedded

Last September, at the start of my internship at Tweede Golf, my tutors gave me a LoRa-E5 Dev Board. My task was to do something that would make it easier to write applications for this device in Rust. Here's what I did.

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.

In our last post, we've seen that async can help reduce power consumption in embedded programs. The async machinery is much more fine-grained at switching to a different task than we reasonably could be. Embassy schedules the work intelligently, which means the work is completed faster and we race to sleep. Our application actually gets more readable because we programmers mostly don't need to worry about breaking up our functions into tasks and switching between them. Any await is a possible switching point.

Now, we want to actually start using async in our programs. Sadly there are currently some limitations. In this post, we'll look at the current workarounds, the tradeoffs, and how the limitations might be partially resolved in the near future.

Previously we talked about conserving energy using async. This time we'll take a look at performing power consumption measurements. Our goal is first to get a feel for how much power is consumed, and then to measure the difference between a standard synchronous and an async implementation of the same application.
To more effectively write Embedded Rust applications, we want a clearer picture of two aspects: how can we ergonomically perform multiple tasks concurrently, and how can we exploit low-power modes to save energy. In the coming weeks, we want to write a small but non-trivial application that communicates with 2 sensors, uses async, and uses the low-power modes to conserve energy.
In embedded systems, energy efficiency is crucial for practical applications. Usually devices run on a battery, so the less energy you use, the longer the power supply will last. In this post we'll look at the basics of going to sleep and waking back up, and build a proof of concept using the nRF52840 development kit.
Welcome to the age of communication. It's 2021 and technology has come a long way. People, large machines and small devices communicate more intensively than ever before, and many technologies to enable them to do so have been developed. Some of those technologies use physical pathways like fibreglass to reach their receivers, others use radio signals to send messages. It's these wireless communication technologies that spark the imagination the most.