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Tech blog on web, security & embedded
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.
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.

Recently, we worked on an embedded (STM32) project in Rust and we got some hands-on experience with the abstractions commonly used for that. There's embedded-hal, which offers abstractions related to timing, GPIO pins and common communication peripherals like SPI and USART. There's also multiple stm32xxx-hal crates which offer abstractions over most of the peripherals of different STM32 CPU families. Although many of them were nice to use, we found some parts to be lacking and we'd like to propose some potential improvements to embedded-hal and its implementing crates.

Rust is nice for a lot of things. At Tweede golf we've been using the language primarily for high-performance web applications. But that's not all Rust can do. Rust can be used to write embedded applications as well.