The Embedded Working Group Newsletter - 18

This is the eighteenth newsletter of the Embedded WG where we highlight new progress, celebrate cool projects, thank the community, and advertise projects that need help!

The winner of the Chat Vote: Matrix

About a month ago, due to Mozilla's plans to discontinue Mozilla IRC, we released RFC 0351: Chat Vote and started a public vote on which chat platform to use for the Rust Embedded Working Group in the future.

The winner of that vote was Matrix, with 160 votes, followed by IRC with 103 votes and Discord with 74 votes. As Matrix has won by more than 3 votes, it will become the new official chat platform for Rust Embedded! The name of our new channel is #rust-embedded:matrix.org, and you can join it right now using a client like Riot.

We will be trialling the new Matrix channel for the next two weeks, using it as our primary and official communication channel. After the trial period, we will evaluate any issues that came up during it, and decide how to proceed. More details about the organization of the channel can be found in the operational notes.

Since IRC ended in second place, and it's our current platform, we'll also be establishing a bridge between the Matrix channel and IRC during the trial. This way, users have the option to continue using IRC if they so desire.

To avoid the administrative overhead of having to switch bridged channels later, we will soon bridge directly to the #rust-embedded channel on Freenode, not to the Mozilla IRC channel. The bridge will be activated once we've worked out the Freenode channel registration.

While Matrix is a federated protocol, we are not planning on running our own infrastructure for now - instead, we will be using the matrix.org IRC bridge, and users are free to register on matrix.org or any other homeserver of their choosing. If this turns out to be a problem during the trial period, we may reconsider this decision.

We're also looking into a static log viewer, that would allow us to publish search-engine-indexable channel logs for public reading, similar to the public logs that we currently have. This may require us to self-host a static log generator such as matrix-static. Suggestions for other solutions are welcome!

Highlights

• We've had a bunch of Embedded Rust related events over the past couple of months. EWG member @thejpster was at ACCU 2019 (the Association of C and C++ Users Annual Conference), in Bristol, UK, on 12 April, delivering a talk on Embeddded Rust and the Monotron. Jonathan was then speaking at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK on 18 April, followed by hosting Oxidize at the end of April! Next up, Monotron is visiting Rust Conf in Portland, USA in late August. Don't forget, if you've been giving or attending Embedded Rust talks, drop us a line for the next newsletter!

• The embedded showcase gained 3 new entries! We are still looking for cool embedded projects to serve that can serve as examples of what can be done in Rust. Don't hesitate to submit yours!

Embedded Projects

• @laanwj, @Disasm and @burrbull are working on Rust support for the Kendryte K210 RISC-V chips.

• @Disasm and @almindor updated riscv-rust-quickstart: now you can run Rust on the HiFive1 Rev B board.

• @Disasm released stm32-usbd: a fork of stm32f103xx-usb adopted for multiple STM32 device families.

embedded-hal Ecosystem Crates

As part of the Weekly Driver Initiative, crates that are part of the embedded-hal ecosystem are now tracked in the Awesome Embedded Rust repository. Here is a current snapshot of what is available there: