Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Introduction

This is the exercise book accompanying the Embedded Rust Workshop. The Workshop provides exercises for Embedded Rust which run on the BBC microbit v2.

For this exercises, you only require the following hardware:

  • The microbit v2.
  • A Micro-USB cable to power the microbit while also connecting it to your computer.

This little educational board has everything we need to teach you the practical part of embedded Rust, including:

  • A 5x5 LED matrix.
  • The LSM303AGR on-board motion sensor.
  • A serial connection accessible by a USB-CDC device

This device has even more features and external connectivity, and you can find all of this information of the microbit website.

Goals

After working through this exercises, you should have the following skills:

  • Extract relevant information from datasheets and/or schematics for firmware development.
  • Understand and work in embedded code using the the embassy asynchronous runtime, which includes using the async / await syntax.
  • Schedule concurrent tasks using embassy.
  • Work with some components of a provided HAL (or BSP).
  • Using embassy-time to perform delays and periodic operations or measure elapsed time.
  • Writing drivers for simple sensors

However, these exercises do not replace or provide a good theoretic foundation and it also does not teach general Rust programming. Low-level aspects like working with registers and details about system boot are are intentionally skipped. The next section provides some further material recommendations to address this.

Further Materials

If you are a beginner in Rust, it is strongly recommended to work through the Rust book or work through some other method of your choice to learn the general language.

The following materials might be valuable for you as well:

  • The embassy book provides additional information and documentation about the embassy asynchronous run-time.
  • The Rusty bits provides excellent visual resources about various embedded Rust aspects.
  • The Ferrous Systems Rust Training slides provide high-quality slides about various topics, including embedded Rust and aspects like system boot and peripheral access crates.

Preparation

We are going to start with the preparation of the software tools in the next chapter.