3 ms·

Rust on Embedded: How we monitor our battery storage systems

20 points by michidk 3y ago

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
There's so much good embedded OS work happening. These Bluetooth, wifi, matter problems? Pretty well tackled by Zephyr & others. It'll be interesting to see if "rewrite it in Rust" really can re-do all these efforts satisfactorily. Or to see how Rust & C interop goes (as Linux is doing). Or whether Rust remains useful & awesome on embedded if and only if you don't need complex protocols and device drivers.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  > Pretty well tackled by Zephyr & others Yeah, we started using Zephyr about a year ago at work and while it hasn't been seamless it has been pretty darned awesome. One of the more interesting outcomes is that, more often than not, we've shifted from "lots of stupid easy bugs" to a smaller handful of "tricky to debug" bugs, around half of them being actual hardware issues and not strictly code issues. One of the most amazing things has been being able to take the same firmware code and run it on our v1 production board using a Cortex M0 and on our v2 prototype board using a Teensy v4.1 Cortex M7 board and all we really needed to do was modify the devicetree to remap which peripherals and pins were connected to the rest of the hardware. Amazing! One of my coworkers has started using Rust on a personal embedded project (on an STM32 processor of some kind). Once we're done this current prototype cycle I want to sit down with him and see what he's got figured out. Seems like a cool place for Rust and all of the memory safety goodness.
mlsu 3y ago
The embedded Rust story, at least for small projects on cortex series MCUs is pretty good. There is embedded-hal which just reached v1.0. This lets anyone to write a HAL against those traits and have drivers and application code across the whole ecosystem be compatible. Traits make it very easy to write portable code. STM32 series have good, relatively fully featured HAL crates. On the tooling side, probe-rs is very nice and lets you get up and running with RTT + debug quickly. The RTOS ecosystem is vibrant. Of note: - The focus of most iot development seems to be embassy-rs - I am building a project with hard real-time guarantees with RTIC and it's been pretty straightforward so far - Oxide's Hubris looks interesting If I were going to write a relatively simple, very high reliability system on an STM32 platform, I would do it in Rust without hesitation. (I am currently doing exactly this)

20 points by michidk 3y ago

There's so much good embedded OS work happening. These Bluetooth, wifi, matter problems? Pretty well tackled by Zephyr & others. It'll be interesting to see if "rewrite it in Rust" really can re-do all these efforts satisfactorily. Or to see how Rust & C interop goes (as Linux is doing). Or whether Rust remains useful & awesome on embedded if and only if you don't need complex protocols and device drivers.

tonyarkles 3y ago
> Pretty well tackled by Zephyr & others Yeah, we started using Zephyr about a year ago at work and while it hasn't been seamless it has been pretty darned awesome. One of the more interesting outcomes is that, more often than not, we've shifted from "lots of stupid easy bugs" to a smaller handful of "tricky to debug" bugs, around half of them being actual hardware issues and not strictly code issues. One of the most amazing things has been being able to take the same firmware code and run it on our v1 production board using a Cortex M0 and on our v2 prototype board using a Teensy v4.1 Cortex M7 board and all we really needed to do was modify the devicetree to remap which peripherals and pins were connected to the rest of the hardware. Amazing! One of my coworkers has started using Rust on a personal embedded project (on an STM32 processor of some kind). Once we're done this current prototype cycle I want to sit down with him and see what he's got figured out. Seems like a cool place for Rust and all of the memory safety goodness.

mlsu 3y ago

The embedded Rust story, at least for small projects on cortex series MCUs is pretty good. There is embedded-hal which just reached v1.0. This lets anyone to write a HAL against those traits and have drivers and application code across the whole ecosystem be compatible. Traits make it very easy to write portable code. STM32 series have good, relatively fully featured HAL crates. On the tooling side, probe-rs is very nice and lets you get up and running with RTT + debug quickly. The RTOS ecosystem is vibrant. Of note: - The focus of most iot development seems to be embassy-rs - I am building a project with hard real-time guarantees with RTIC and it's been pretty straightforward so far - Oxide's Hubris looks interesting If I were going to write a relatively simple, very high reliability system on an STM32 platform, I would do it in Rust without hesitation. (I am currently doing exactly this)