std-training VS rp2040-mandel-pico

It's well established that interrupts are a tough concept to grasp for the embedded beginner. Add to that when doing it in Rust the complexity of dealing with mutable static variables. This is because working with shared variables and interrupts is inherently unsafe if proper measures are not taken. When looking at how to do interrupts using the esp-idf-hal I first resorted to the Embedded Rust on Espressif book. Interrupts are covered under the Advanced Workshop in section 4.3, and to be honest, I was taken aback a little at what could be an additional level of complexity for a beginner. Without too much detail, this is because the book resorts to using lower-level implementations. For those interested, by that, I mean FFI interfaces to FreeRTOS which I will be creating a separate post about later.

Relative to the esp-idf-hal , as far as material goes, there exists training material that is open sourced by Ferrous systems. The training material takes a bit of a different approach where it starts with high-level IoT exercises followed by low-level control. Additionally, the training is based on the awesome Rust ESP board hardware.

Yes! The training developed with Ferrous Systems (https://esp-rs.github.io/std-training/) contains several examples, and you can find many community projects in https://github.com/esp-rs/awesome-esp-rust#projects

Good places to get started with std Rust on ESP include the Rust on ESP book, Embedded Rust on Espressif by Ferrous Systems. There's also the Awesome ESP Rust GitHub repository that contains a lot of useful material and project examples.

Embedded Rust on Espressif (Ferrous Systems training)

I must admit I've never used it for anything but tutorials yet (kids resulted in a lot of personal projects shelved), but Rust has an amazing and rapidly developing embedded ecosystem. A good starting point to get an impression of it might be training materials from Ferrous Systems 1, 2 (feel free to pay for the training itself if you feel like it's worth it for you of course). There is an embedded working group for Rust, Knurling project to improve tooling and even an attempt of Rust standard certified for safety-critical application.

I’ve been super curious about both Rust and ESP. It seems like Espressif is interested enough to commission a Rust dev board (ESP32-C3-DevKit-RUST-1) and training using it.

https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-rust-board/

https://github.com/ferrous-systems/espressif-trainings

I started to explore the area, mostly arm based (rp2040 and STM) and a little bit of ESP32.

Tool chain wise:

ESP32 support is very recent and still based on the C tool chain and this makes it very fragile (you can break your environment easily and it is never clear how to recover except recompiling the entire tooolchain from 0)

Arm is a little better because the support is native.

The community is trying to make a generic embedded Hal platform API and implement it for specific devices. And it is pretty bad: almost no documentation, very few examples, tons of autogenerated code where you need to come back to the C world to understand the actual concepts.

Once you start to get going Rust is a blast to program in and the generated code is pretty efficient.

A small project a shared to help people starting on a lilygo device: https://github.com/gbin/rp2040-mandel-pico