Boston Embdded Systems Meetup: Bring and Blink

Discover the world of microcontrollers through Rust!

This book is an edited version for the Boston Embedded Systems Meetup and is based on japaric's discovery book. This book is for an "introductory tutorial" on microcontroller-based "embedded systems" that uses Rust as the teaching language rather than the usual C/C++.

Scope

The following topics will be covered in this tutorial:

  • How to write, build, flash and debug an "embedded" (Rust) program.

  • How to make LEDs blink, print messages over JTAG using itm, and some basic Rust.

Approach

  • Beginner friendly. No previous experience with microcontrollers or embedded systems is required.

  • Hands on. Plenty of exercises to put the theory into practice. You will be doing most of the work here.

  • Tool centered. We'll make plenty use of tooling to ease development. "Real" debugging, GDB, and logging will be introduced early on. Using LEDs as a debugging mechanism has no place here.

Non-goals

What's out of scope for this tutorial:

  • Teaching Rust in depth. There is plenty of material, and the officia Rust Programming Language Book is a great place to start.

  • Being a comprehensive introduction about electric circuit theory or electronics. We'll just cover the minimum required to understand how some devices work (if at all).

  • Covering Rustic, low-level details. We won't be talking about linker scripts, the boot process or how to glue those two into a minimally working Rust program. The Copper book has information on those topics though.

  • Working with peripherals or anything more complicated than LEDs and basic Rust programs the Discovery book is a great place to go after this book and will keep you going. (Thanks japaric!)

  • Being a general reference for programming microcontrollers. The intent is to get a handful of people up and running in a short period of time! Depth is not our aim!

Thanks To:

  • Canopy: for allowing us to use their space.
  • japaric: for writing a majority of the content.

Original Sponsors of the Discovery book

This tutorial is based on japric's Discovery book which was sponsored by:

Many thanks to integer 32 for sponsoring me to continue working on this book! Please give them lots of work (they do Rust consulting!) so they'll have no choice but to hire more Rustaceans <3.