Embedded WG Newsletter #4

[jamesmunns]

Placeholder for the next newsletter, scheduled roughly 2018-04-26

[djmcgill]

My utility Form is useful when working with tools like svd2rust which generate massive lib files, might be worth a mention - alway happy to accept pull requests.

[japaric]

heapless v0.3.1 has been released; this version provides fixed capacity re-implementations of std::HashMap and std::HashSet that work on #![no_std], do not require a memory allocator, can be allocated on the stack or stored in a static variable, and use 32-bit hashes (32-bit FNV and MurmurHash3 hashers are available in the hash32 crate).

[astro]

heapless v0.3.1 has been released; […]

When discussing the heapless crate, I would like to hint at the managed crate. It additionally works on Vec et al if built with std and it features a BTreeMap behind the map feature-flag.

[whitequark]

(I think we should probably stabilize map already.)

[danielgallagher0]

I've started a BLE crate. I'm currently "only" aiming to support BLE hosts, so it would be used to interface with an external controller, not to implement a controller. It's still very early, but I have a framework in place so it should be straightforward to add the remaining commands and events. I'd love to get some feedback, advice, etc.

I also have a first implementation, BlueNRG which should support STMicro's family of BlueNRG chips. I have an SPBTLE-RF that I am working with, so those two crates will at least support that chip.

A particular request would be for someone to add to BLE and/or use it on a different chip, preferably from a different vendor.

Oh, and if anyone has an idea for a better name, that would be great. ble is already claimed.

[therealprof]

@danielgallagher0 Nice. So you're implementing an adapter for the HCI interface I would presume?

I'm not a big fan of 3 letter acronyms anyway as they make for horrible search terms. How about writing out Bluetooth and if you're writing an HCI adapter -- throw that in as well?

[jamesmunns]

@djmcgill wow, form is everything I didn't know I needed 😄

I just used it on my nrf52 crate and it worked perfectly: https://github.com/jamesmunns/nrf52/tree/master/src

Thanks for that!

[therealprof]

Wow, indeed. I haven't noticed that post before but form is really fantastic!

[japaric]

The newsletter should mention that we our IRC meetings are open for anyone to attend and that guests can bring up issues / topics to discuss by commenting on the agenda issues. We should also mention that members of the embedded WG will be present during the RustFest Paris impl days and that we are looking for contributors interested in working towards the 2018 edition milestone.

[danielgallagher0]

@therealprof Yes, it's an implementation of the HCI specification. I'm looking over the BT spec, and I think just calling it the Bluetooth HCI would be accurate, and bluetooth-hci makes a decent crate name, and can be extended in the future (bluetooth-core, bluetooth-controller, etc.).

[japaric]

We have preview of embedded Rust on stable and would love some feedback. See #42 (comment) for details.

[hannobraun]

Version 0.3 of the lpc82x crate has been released. It now uses the newest versions of svd2rust and cortex-m.

[hannobraun]

I realize it's past the deadline(?), but since the newsletter is not out yet, I'm adding this. Happy to wait for the next one though, if that works better for you.

Version 0.1 of LPC82x HAL, the hardware abstraction layer for NXP's LPC82x family of microcontrollers, has been released. Links: Announcement, crates.io, GitHub

[jamesmunns]

Hey @hannobraun, I plan on writing the post today, busy week :). Your post will make it in this week.