The Embedded Working Group Newsletter - 5

This is the fifth bi-weekly newsletter of the Embedded WG where we highlight new progress, celebrate cool projects, thank the community, and advertise projects that need help!

If you want to mention something in the next newsletter, make sure to leave a comment on the issue.

Highlights

• We had a bonus Embedded-WG Newsletter this week about the path forward towards stable Embedded Rust, and what you can do as a crate maintainer to help with the effort!
• The Tock-OS project posted about their MMIO Registers, contrasting them to crates generated by svd2rust
• There were a couple of great posts about developing with Rust on Embedded targets from 219 Design and nercury
• If Game Boy Advance development with Rust sounds interesting to you, make sure you check out the rusty-TONC and stdgba projects

Embedded Projects

If you have an embedded project or blog post you would like to have featured in the Embedded WG Newsletter, make sure to mention it on the tracking issue for the next newsletter, we would love to show it off!

• Kjetil Kjeka shared their crate uX pronounced as "unsigned X" for working with non standard integer types (like u7, u63, etc) which act like the built in unsigned integer types
• Adam Greig shared two crates:
  • stm32-rs, a tool for cleaning up Chip Support Crates for STM32 microcontrollers and making it easier to work between multiple devices
  • blethrs, an ethernet bootloader for STM32F4 chips, using the smoltcp networking stack
• James Waples released a driver for ssd1306 based OLED displays, read the announcement blog for more info
• John Scarrott released a Chip Support Crate for the nRF52840 chip from Nordic Semiconductor
• Kerem posted a new Chip Support Crate for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF51, and joined development of the existing nrf51-hal HAL Impl Crate
• Teo Röijezon released a combo of a stm32f0x0 Chip Support Crate, as well as a stm32f0x0-hal HAL Impl Crate
• Rahul Thakoor shipped a driver crate for mma7660fc based 3-axis accelerometers. Check out the mma7660fc blog announcement
• whitequark shared their log_buffer crate for storing UTF-8 text in a ring buffer, and accessing it as &strs
• Michael shared proptest, a tool for performing Property Based Testing, which now has no_std support thanks to a PR from Zack Pierce
• theJPster has been working on Monotron - a small 8-bit style home computer with a ROM written in Rust - ready for his talk at RustFest. For this, he's been working on crates for generating VGA video, decoding PS/2 keyboard scancodes and interactive text-based menu systems.

embedded-hal Ecosystem Crates

As part of the Weekly Driver Initiative, crates that are part of the embedded-hal ecosystem are now tracked in the Awesome Embedded Rust repository. Here is a current snapshot of what is available there:

Help Wanted

• Make sure to check out the path forward post, and report any issues you find!
• Raspberry Fields is a festival of digital making, centered around the Raspberry Pi. It's taking place on Saturday 30 June and Sunday 1 July, in Cambridge, England. theJPster would love to set up a Rust stall, to talk to everyone about the advantages Rust offers and how they can get in to Rust on the Raspberry Pi. But to make that work, he needs your help! If you're interested, contact @therealjpster on Twitter or email pi@thejpster.org.uk.
• Some members of the embedded WG will attend the RustFest impl days in two weeks. If you want to make Rust awesome for embedded development come help us! We have tasks with mentors and some hardware to give away!. Let us know if you are interested in helping out by commenting on that issue.