Rust on Tessel

Rust is a new systems programming language emphasizing safety, concurrency, and speed. It requires no runtime, so it's suitable to use as a better C for microcontroller development. This is a simple demo running Rust on bare metal on a Tessel, which uses a NXP LPC1800 microcontroller with an ARM Cortex M3 core.

The standard Rust compiler is capable of cross-compiling for ARM. See the Rust Guide for installation instructions, as well as learning the language.

You'll also need a copy of gcc-arm-embedded. We won't use its C compiler, but it includes an assembler, linker, and binutils.

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/kevinmehall/rust-tessel
cd rust-tessel

You need a copy of Rust's libcore compiled for ARM, so clone the rust repository and build the library:

git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust
rustc -O --target=thumbv7m-linux-eabi rust/src/libcore/lib.rs

I've wrapped the commands to compile, link, and produce a binary image into build.sh script

./build.sh blinky.rs

Use the Tessel bootloader to run the executable:

tessel boot blinky.bin

It runs from RAM, so press the Reset button to return to normal Tessel firmware.