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- Hacker News
- BUN in ovenby effnorwood
- I've got an ESP32-S3 original that was festering in a drawer. Took it out a few weekends back and plugged it into a claude session. Within a morning it was running a custom rust firmware that was showing the monitoring overview for the $WORK network. Considering I've got very minimal rust experience, to be able to spin up a custom firmware in such a short time really was something. Not sure I'd trust in on the network without doing an audit of what it's doing, but as a fun Sunday experiment, it scratched the itchby _joel
- awesome to see this under espressif.com! that's so fantastic.
not to the point here, but i wonder what Zephyr would have been like if Rust had been more of a thing at the time. that's not really possible, as from my understanding it derived from Wind River Systems' donated Rocket OS, which i think predates Rust (which is not a new language!). still an interesting what if to me: zephyr seems to be the embedded os with the best wireless support by a country mile, have a lot of companies targeting it (often alas forking it rather than going upstream): it holds my interest the most.
- The [page on testing][1] suggests this:
> Where possible, and where it makes sense, you should try to test as much as possible on your host machine, not on the target device.
When I have tried this I have encountered multiple problems, first that the Rust test framework requires std, making it convoluted writing test code – but when working around that using conditional compilation, I run into other things like the `esp-hal` depending on crates that won't compile on the host.
What is the recommended way to test on the host?
[1]: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/application-development/testing.htmlby iconara - Rust on ESP32 was great at one point. ~1 year ago there was a major HAL re-write and consolidation, and it went for me from working, to very broken, with most of the recent commits revamping it being done by someone who was neither an Espressif employee, nor someone who had written the original code bases. I haven't checked it since then.
I bring this up as for some workflows, Rust is one of the easiest "just works" embedded toolchains/workflows; my experience here was jarringly different, especially as it had been a good workflow prior. On this project, I ended up switching to ESP-Hosted (Official Espressif firmware to let the ESP be a radio co-processor), writing my own Rust lib to interface with it over SPI or UART, and using an STM32 as the primary MCU running my [rust] firmware.