KAkaycebasques·Mar 9, 2025
I've been ramping up on the embedded Rust ecosystem over the last few weeks. I'm pretty excited about it partly because it makes this aspect of embedded development much more approachable. On https://crates.io I can usually find a driver for whatever peripheral I want to use in my project. And the driver usually implements the embedded-hal [1] interface, so the more I get familiar with that interface, the easier it becomes to implement any arbitrary peripheral into my project. In the event that there does not already exist a crate for my peripheral, I have an extensive ecosystem [2] of open source driver code that I can refer to in order to figure out how to implement the driver.
I think this could help with the "dark art of reading datasheets" problem. E.g. last night I was curious about how the driver for a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor would
Read the rest
work, so I looked at the code [3] for its driver and got a pretty good sense of what's going on. If I were to now attempt to read the datasheet, a lot of it would now make sense. In other words I think it's too daunting to read a datasheet and then try to implement code. The way to get comfortable with datasheets is to first look at code and then find the relevant parts of the datasheet. Previously it was hard to find and make sense of relevant code for a particular driver, now it's much easier.
[1] https://github.com/rust-embedded/embedded-hal
[2] https://crates.io/keywords/embedded-hal-driver
[3] https://github.com/MnlPhlp/uln2003