stm32f4xx-hal VS probe-run

I would personally use the abstractions provided by the stm32f4xx-hal crate more. See https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32f4xx-hal/tree/master/examples/ for examples.

For this project, the audio ended up being the biggest challenge. I spent a few days on-and-off working on it because it would stop working as I modified the PWM frequency. I was eventually able to track it down to a bug in the HAL and opened a PR accordingly: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32f4xx-hal/pull/555

For my specific issue, I'm using the stm32f4xx-hal library to control a bunch of RGB leds, each with a pwm output. Since I have to get pins and timers where I can find them, each component of the led is made by something like

At the time of writing this post, I noticed that if going with option 1 stated earlier that returns a PWMChannel can prove to be quite problematic. In navigating the documentation, the PWMChannel implementations do not include methods that allow to get and set the period of the peripheral. There is an issue that I submitted here for that.

Maybe check out this example from the stm324xx-hal repo?

Here is an example for stm32f407 (trivial to change to stm32f411) that gets random numbers from the rng peripheral and displays them on an ssd1306 display: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32f4xx-hal/blob/master/examples/rng-display.rs although this uses Rust, which you may or may not like. Arduino will have you covered as well, obviously.

A major benefit of Rust in embedded is how easy it is to use libraries. This example implements USB serial communication on an STM32 in under 80 lines. You add some libs and if it compiles it works.

Install probe-run (this is optional, but makes flashing easier)

This made me want to try getting some of these tools running. Probe run looked so handy, but it just doesn't work for me.

For flashing, Check out Kurling's Probe-run, and related tools like defmt, as well as their app template.

You don't need a USB file system for a convenient dev experience. In fact you can achieve an even more integrated experience with Rust today, on essentially any Cortex-M microcontroller if you set up probe-run. It makes cargo run flash and run the code on your microcontroller and can even be invoked with rust-analyzer's run button or an IDE command.

I've been looking for a way to debug my application like I would from GDB (ie: set breakpoints, inspect registers, step, etc.) but I haven't found any documentation on how to accomplish this with probe-run.