Introduction

Welcome to The Embedded Rust Book: An introductory book about using the Rust Programming Language on “Bare Metal” embedded systems, such as Microcontrollers.

Who Embedded Rust is For

Embedded Rust is for everyone who wants to do embedded programming while taking advantage of the higher-level concepts and safety guarantees the Rust language provides. (See also Who Rust Is For)

Scope

The goals of this book are:

• Get developers up to speed with embedded Rust development. i.e. How to set up a development environment.

• Share current best practices about using Rust for embedded development. i.e. How to best use Rust language features to write more correct embedded software.

• Serve as a cookbook in some cases. e.g. How do I mix C and Rust in a single project?

This book tries to be as general as possible but to make things easier for both the readers and the writers it uses the ARM Cortex-M architecture in all its examples. However, the book doesn’t assume that the reader is familiar with this particular architecture and explains details particular to this architecture where required.

Who This Book is For

This book caters towards people with either some embedded background or some Rust background, however we believe everybody curious about embedded Rust programming can get something out of this book. For those without any prior knowledge we suggest you read the “Assumptions and Prerequisites” section and catch up on missing knowledge to get more out of the book and improve your reading experience. You can check out the “Other Resources” section to find resources on topics you might want to catch up on.

Assumptions and Prerequisites

• You are comfortable using the Rust Programming Language, and have written, run, and debugged Rust applications on a desktop environment. You should also be familiar with the idioms of the 2018 edition as this book targets Rust 2018.

• You are comfortable developing and debugging embedded systems in another language such as C, C++, or Ada, and are familiar with concepts such as:

  • Cross Compilation
  • Memory Mapped Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • Common interfaces such as I2C, SPI, Serial, etc.

Other Resources

If you are unfamiliar with anything mentioned above or if you want more information about a specific topic mentioned in this book you might find some of these resources helpful.

Translations

This book has been translated by generous volunteers. If you would like your translation listed here, please open a PR to add it.

• Japanese (repository)

• Chinese (repository)

How to Use This Book

This book generally assumes that you’re reading it front-to-back. Later chapters build on concepts in earlier chapters, and earlier chapters may not dig into details on a topic, revisiting the topic in a later chapter.

This book will be using the STM32F3DISCOVERY development board from STMicroelectronics for the majority of the examples contained within. This board is based on the ARM Cortex-M architecture, and while basic functionality is the same across most CPUs based on this architecture, peripherals and other implementation details of Microcontrollers are different between different vendors, and often even different between Microcontroller families from the same vendor.

For this reason, we suggest purchasing the STM32F3DISCOVERY development board for the purpose of following the examples in this book.

Contributing to This Book

The work on this book is coordinated in this repository and is mainly developed by the resources team.

If you have trouble following the instructions in this book or find that some section of the book is not clear enough or hard to follow then that’s a bug and it should be reported in the issue tracker of this book.

Pull requests fixing typos and adding new content are very welcome!

Re-using this material

This book is distributed under the following licenses:

• The code samples and free-standing Cargo projects contained within this book are licensed under the terms of both the MIT License and the Apache License v2.0.
• The written prose, pictures and diagrams contained within this book are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA v4.0 license.

TL;DR: If you want to use our text or images in your work, you need to:

• Give the appropriate credit (i.e. mention this book on your slide, and provide a link to the relevant page)
• Provide a link to the CC-BY-SA v4.0 licence
• Indicate if you have changed the material in any way, and make any changes to our material available under the same licence

Also, please do let us know if you find this book useful!