Build it

The first step is to build our "binary" crate. Because the microcontroller has different architecture than your laptop we'll have to cross compile. Cross compiling in Rust land is as simple as passing an extra --target flag to rustcor Cargo. The complicated part is figuring out the argument of that flag: the name of the target.

The microcontroller in the F3 has a Cortex-M4F processor in it. rustc knows how to cross compile to the Cortex-M architecture and provides 4 different targets that cover the different processor families within that architecture:

• thumbv6m-none-eabi, for the Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M1 processors
• thumbv7m-none-eabi, for the Cortex-M3 processor
• thumbv7em-none-eabi, for the Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7 processors
• thumbv7em-none-eabihf, for the Cortex-M4F and Cortex-M7F processors

For the F3, we'll to use the thumbv7em-none-eabihf target.

Now, rustup doesn't provide a binary release of the core crate for this target, so we'll use Xargo instead of Cargo. Xargo will take care of compiling the core crate for us:

$ xargo build --target thumbv7em-none-eabihf
   Compiling rlibc v1.0.0
   Compiling volatile-register v0.1.2
   Compiling ref_slice v1.1.1
   Compiling f3 v0.3.0
   Compiling cortex-m v0.1.6
   Compiling stm32f30x-memory-map v0.1.2
   Compiling compiler-builtins-snapshot v0.0.20161008+c56faf22abb39724008148d58f12bcd43b6d236b
   Compiling pg v0.1.0 (file:///home/cwoodall/workspace/personal/discovery/src/04-blink/pg)
   Compiling blink v0.1.0 (file:///home/cwoodall/workspace/personal/discovery/src/04-blink)
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 4.45 secs

NOTE Be sure to compile this crate without optimizations

Also, let me note that Xargo exposes the exact same UI as Cargo so you can use any subcommand (even custom ones) that you would normally use with Cargo.

OK, now we have produced an executable. As a sanity check, let's verify that the produced executable is actually an ARM binary:

# *nix only
$ file target/thumbv7em-none-eabihf/debug/blink
blink: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped
                                  ~~~  ~~~~~                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another way to do that is to use readelf because the executable produced by rustc is actually an ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) file.

$ arm-none-eabi-readelf -h target/thumbv7em-none-eabihf/debug/blink
ELF Header:
  Magic:   7f 45 4c 46 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
  Class:                             ELF32
  Data:                              2's complement, little endian
  Version:                           1 (current)
  OS/ABI:                            UNIX - System V
  ABI Version:                       0
  Type:                              EXEC (Executable file)
  Machine:                           ARM <--
  Version:                           0x1
  Entry point address:               0x8000195 <--
  Start of program headers:          52 (bytes into file)
  Start of section headers:          555816 (bytes into file)
  Flags:                             0x5000400, Version5 EABI, hard-float ABI <--
  Size of this header:               52 (bytes)
  Size of program headers:           32 (bytes)
  Number of program headers:         2
  Size of section headers:           40 (bytes)
  Number of section headers:         17
  Section header string table index: 14

Next, we'll "flash" the program into our microcontroller.