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.