How to use Rust to develop firmware for bare metal (microcontroller) devices
In this technical retrospective (2018), @febin shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 10 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
The link is to an online book which is pretty cool and the target processor isn't far off (stm32f3 but my hardware guy prefers kinetis for some reason, at least we're in the same cortex land). Timely in that I was looking at a couple of weeks downtime with the new year and perhaps this can fill it productively although I'm only guardedly optimistic: It's going to be hard to supplant the nice build environment I get in the IAR product
I’ll switch to Rust for embedded once there’s a really solid USB stack. UART don’t cut it no more for talking to a computer. Seems to be in the works though!