5 ms·

I've looked at Rust-on-ESP a number of times in the past, but it's never been at a level of "I can make an LED blink within an hour or so". Is there a write-up

by quchen 3y ago

I've looked at Rust-on-ESP a number of times in the past, but it's never been at a level of "I can make an LED blink within an hour or so". Is there a write-up for interested but not deeply involved people somewhere? How far are we from "clone this, run ./flash and the LED will blink"? How hard is it to use existing Arduino libs (e.g. MQTT, popular sensors, FastLed), or what would the ecosystem look like? I keep daydreaming about replacing my C-IoT-home mess in Rust in the meantime. :-)

the__alchemist 3y ago
This is what I threw together: https://github.com/David-OConnor/esp32c3_quickstart https://github.com/David-OConnor/esp32c3_quickstart In theory, there is a quickstart CLI tool that should generate a project, but it is currently broken. This is the repo I set up that "just works" for C3.
- sergiogasquez 3y ago
  > In theory, there is a quickstart CLI tool that should generate a project, but it is currently broken. Which tool do you mean? `cargo-generate` it's working fine for both templates: - esp-idf-template(std): https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-idf-template https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-idf-template) - esp-template (no_std): https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-template https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-template
  - the__alchemist 3y ago
    Yep - that's what I'm referring to. Broken as of when I tried 2 weeks ago; can't speak to it currently.
- ukd1 3y ago
  Ya, the tooling is improving (e.g. https://github.com/esp-rs/espup https://github.com/esp-rs/espup) - but still, the experience with Rust is always interesting; I try it every few months, then give up as it breaks, sometimes check tinygo, then realize it's still missing wifi/bt support, and go back to c. Micropython is interesting, but also the developer experience around the tooling isn't great. I was spoiled with rails imho. (if tinygo supported more than one core, and had wifi/bt support on esp32, I'd not be looking back that often)
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Hopefully it will continually improve given that at least one person is paid to work on it full time. It's come a long long way over the past few years.
vollbrecht 3y ago
If you are using esp-idf-sys you can include external C library's. Beside it providing all the original esp-idf C bindings, it can include either locally vendored library's or (using the esp-idf component manager) remote components. You just need to declare them correctly inside your Cargo.toml and it will automatically expose it all inside Rust. Though i have to say using C api's can be a hazard and to effectively using it you now have two problems as a potential rust beginner. First you need a good rust unsafe understanding and second you need good C understanding. So nothing i would recommend to a beginner, in either of this fields.
DannyBee 3y ago
Don't do esp-idf-* with rust. Really. ESP-RS (baremetal) is usable, and nice. I would happily recommend it if you can live with the state of bluetooth/wifi not being awesome quite yet. ESP-IDF-* is a consistent mess. APIs break continuously and in ways that are often hard to upgrade. It is very difficult to find a combination of library versions that work with anything else in the ecosystem (embedded-), mainly due to esp-idf not keeping up or doing weird things. This is deliberate - they want to move esp- everything forward together, which is nice, except nobody else in the entire embedded ecosystem is on their release schedule so the result is things are always broken. Even funnier is that this all happens while esp-idf itself is rather stable and usable. In fact, at various times, it has been in a known-broken state with the latest stable ESP-IDF for months. Known broken here doesn't mean "some stuff doesn't work". It means "it doesn't build at all and requires you hand-patch git checkouts to make it work". You can read how at least one main maintainer responds to issues (which basically amount to explaining why everyone else is wrong and they are right. It's fun to watch them recommend their own libraries as the one-true-way and tell people that they think it's a mistake to use loops so they don't care that something doesn't work), and get a good feeling for why all the above is true. Everyone else in the community is quite nice and reasonable, and seems to care about users. But at this point, i'm literally taking projects I wrote in ESP rust and moving them back to C++ (one right now, in fact, i'm taking a break to write this comment) and will try again for years. Given how it has gone, and the direction that certain folks push in, i don't have a lot of faith it will get significantly better. If you want to do baremetal, do it and live with it. If you want to try to use esp-idf, i would highly recommend you don't do it. I literally have to keep copies of patched, pinned, libraries and sdks to something that works in the esp rust things i have. For future rust work, i will only use things supported by embassy.
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  Great info, with this caveat: > I would happily recommend it if you can live with the state of bluetooth/wifi not being awesome quite yet. ESP32's main niche is embedded WiFi and Btle. With Bluetooth there are some alternatives, but Espressif is the nicest. For Wi-Fi, there are no integrated alternatives I'm aware of. So, if I'm on ESP, it's probably because of WiFi and/or Btle, which makes IDF appealing.

by quchen 3y ago

the__alchemist 3y ago

This is what I threw together: https://github.com/David-OConnor/esp32c3_quickstart https://github.com/David-OConnor/esp32c3_quickstart In theory, there is a quickstart CLI tool that should generate a project, but it is currently broken. This is the repo I set up that "just works" for C3.

sergiogasquez 3y ago
> In theory, there is a quickstart CLI tool that should generate a project, but it is currently broken. Which tool do you mean? `cargo-generate` it's working fine for both templates: - esp-idf-template(std): https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-idf-template https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-idf-template) - esp-template (no_std): https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-template https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-template
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  Yep - that's what I'm referring to. Broken as of when I tried 2 weeks ago; can't speak to it currently.
ukd1 3y ago
Ya, the tooling is improving (e.g. https://github.com/esp-rs/espup https://github.com/esp-rs/espup) - but still, the experience with Rust is always interesting; I try it every few months, then give up as it breaks, sometimes check tinygo, then realize it's still missing wifi/bt support, and go back to c. Micropython is interesting, but also the developer experience around the tooling isn't great. I was spoiled with rails imho. (if tinygo supported more than one core, and had wifi/bt support on esp32, I'd not be looking back that often)
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Hopefully it will continually improve given that at least one person is paid to work on it full time. It's come a long long way over the past few years.

vollbrecht 3y ago

If you are using esp-idf-sys you can include external C library's. Beside it providing all the original esp-idf C bindings, it can include either locally vendored library's or (using the esp-idf component manager) remote components. You just need to declare them correctly inside your Cargo.toml and it will automatically expose it all inside Rust. Though i have to say using C api's can be a hazard and to effectively using it you now have two problems as a potential rust beginner. First you need a good rust unsafe understanding and second you need good C understanding. So nothing i would recommend to a beginner, in either of this fields.

DannyBee 3y ago

Don't do esp-idf-* with rust. Really. ESP-RS (baremetal) is usable, and nice. I would happily recommend it if you can live with the state of bluetooth/wifi not being awesome quite yet. ESP-IDF-* is a consistent mess. APIs break continuously and in ways that are often hard to upgrade. It is very difficult to find a combination of library versions that work with anything else in the ecosystem (embedded-), mainly due to esp-idf not keeping up or doing weird things. This is deliberate - they want to move esp- everything forward together, which is nice, except nobody else in the entire embedded ecosystem is on their release schedule so the result is things are always broken. Even funnier is that this all happens while esp-idf itself is rather stable and usable. In fact, at various times, it has been in a known-broken state with the latest stable ESP-IDF for months. Known broken here doesn't mean "some stuff doesn't work". It means "it doesn't build at all and requires you hand-patch git checkouts to make it work". You can read how at least one main maintainer responds to issues (which basically amount to explaining why everyone else is wrong and they are right. It's fun to watch them recommend their own libraries as the one-true-way and tell people that they think it's a mistake to use loops so they don't care that something doesn't work), and get a good feeling for why all the above is true. Everyone else in the community is quite nice and reasonable, and seems to care about users. But at this point, i'm literally taking projects I wrote in ESP rust and moving them back to C++ (one right now, in fact, i'm taking a break to write this comment) and will try again for years. Given how it has gone, and the direction that certain folks push in, i don't have a lot of faith it will get significantly better. If you want to do baremetal, do it and live with it. If you want to try to use esp-idf, i would highly recommend you don't do it. I literally have to keep copies of patched, pinned, libraries and sdks to something that works in the esp rust things i have. For future rust work, i will only use things supported by embassy.

the__alchemist 3y ago
Great info, with this caveat: > I would happily recommend it if you can live with the state of bluetooth/wifi not being awesome quite yet. ESP32's main niche is embedded WiFi and Btle. With Bluetooth there are some alternatives, but Espressif is the nicest. For Wi-Fi, there are no integrated alternatives I'm aware of. So, if I'm on ESP, it's probably because of WiFi and/or Btle, which makes IDF appealing.