MicroRust

Discover the world of microcontrollers through Rust on the BBC micro:bit!

This book is an introductory course on microcontroller-based embedded systems that uses Rust as the teaching language (rather than the usual C/C++), and the micro:bit as the target system.

Approach

Beginner friendly. No previous experience with microcontrollers or embedded systems is required.

Hands on. You will be doing most of the work here. When possible, pages will end on a problem for you to solve, with the solution on the next page. There are plenty of exercises to put the theory into practice.

Standard. We'll make plenty use of standard tooling and processes to ease development so you can apply the skills learnt to any Rust embedded project. Fixing compiler errors, debugging with GDB, and logging will be introduced early on. Using LEDs as a debugging mechanism has no place here.

Scope

The following topics are covered in the core chapters:

How to write, build, flash and debug an embedded program.

Basic operation of a GPIO, ubiquitous in microcontrollers.

The rest of the chapters are independent, only requiring the core knowledge:

Functionality ("peripherals") commonly found in microcontrollers: Digital input and output, including buttons and LEDs



Non-goals

What's out of scope for this book:

Teaching Rust. There's plenty of material on that topic already. We'll focus on microcontrollers and embedded systems.

Teaching electric circuit theory or electronics. We'll cover the minimum required to understand how some devices work along the way.

Covering Rustic, low level details. We won't be talking about linker scripts, the boot process, or how to glue those two into a minimally working Rust program.

Reporting problems

The source of this book is in this repository. If you encounter any typo or problem please report it on the issue tracker, or even submit a pull request.