Using std Rust on Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)

About

This is a proof-of-concept for using the Rust standard library (std) on RP2040. You can use standard API such as println! or thread::spawn, as well as peripheral access using embedded-hal.

It leverages ESP-IDF support of std and combines Pico SDK, FreeRTOS, and some code adopted from ESP-IDF. Hence it creates a weird target triple called thumbv6m-none-espidf-eabi.

Prerequisites

Only tested on Windows 11.

• Nightly Rust and Cargo
• rust-src
• GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain (which includes GCC and Newlib for arm-none-eabi)
• CMake
• Ninja
• ldproxy (can be installed by cargo install ldproxy)

Building and flashing

Building

Only the following command line is required for build. It produces an ELF file pico-std-rust in target/thumbv6m-none-espidf-eabi/debug/ directory.

cargo build

Pico SDK and FreeRTOS source code are automatically downloaded during build.

Step 3: Flashing binary on Raspberry Pi Pico

If you have a SWD debug probe, you can use probe-rs-cli for flashing.

probe-rs-cli download target/thumbv6m-none-espidf-eabi/debug/pico-std-rust --chip RP2040

Probably, converting ELF to UF2 and drag-and-drop flashing using BOOTSEL will also work.

TODO

• Protect internally used peripherals from embedded-hal access
• Networking support for Pico W

License

Portions written by me are licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0 license. However this repo also contains code from ESP-IDF under Apache 2.0 license only.