ambientsensor-rs

This is a rust re-implementation of an embedded C project I did a while ago: AmbientSensor.

Schematics, photos, ect. will be in that repository, this repository is just for the rust firmware.

Status

This is still a work in progress.

1. The OPT3002 luminosity sensor is not implemented.
2. The panic handler needs to get hooked up to the EEPROM to store error logs then reset.

Purpose

Co-workers kept hyping up this new rust language, and I wanted to see if the hype was warranted.

On paper rust seems amazing, but the only way to really evaluate a language is to use it. I specifically wanted to compare embedded rust to embedded C, and AmbientSensor was simply the last embedded project I completed in C.

Turns out, the hype was warranted.

There is not a lot of commentary I can offer about embedded rust that has not already been said. The concepts rust introduces (safety, ownership, lifetimes) make developing robust code simple. The language is new and still has a small (but rapidly growing) ecosystem for embedded development. From my experience a lot of embedded development is still C simply because nothing else offers a compelling reason to switch (except C++ depending on who you ask). The features rust brings to the table are incredibly compelling for embedded development, and I think rust has a bright future in this industry.

Notable crates used

• rtic – RTOS
• rtt_target – Probe based logging
• cargo-embed – build and run your code with one command
• embedded-hal – abstractions for embedded hardware

Crates Developed

• eeprom25aa02e48 – EEPROM driver, my first rust crate
• w5500-ll – Low level W5500 Ethernet chip driver
• w5500-hl – Higher level W5500 Ethernet chip driver
• w5500-dhcp – Simple W5500 DHCP client
• bme280-multibus – Bosch BME280 driver
• newam-mqtt – MQTT packet serialization and deserialization

Building

You will need rustup and the thumbv6m-none-eabi target.

rustup target add thumbv6m-none-eabi

After you have that target available you can build, the default target is already set in .cargo/config.toml.

cargo build