From Electron to bare metal GUIs in no easy steps

The embedded touchscreen hardware in this talk sits in the twilight zone between a microprocessor (like a raspberri pi, laptop, pc or smartphone) and a microcontroller (like something that powers a washing machine or a microwave oven). High powered microcontrollers can have features from their microprocessor cousins and this talk will cover why these features make embedded rust development that little bit more difficult than it already is.

I left the job market two years ago to work on various personal projects. The first one was to build an open source hearing aid in Rust which was presented at Rust Nation 2024 (“What’s that behind your ear? An open source hearing aid in Rust”). The second was to try to build a commercially viable physical product where I would use Rust for the embedded software. This talk should be of interest to anyone who would like to go on the same journey or is just curious about what it takes to build an embedded product in Rust. Topics include writing an LCD display driver for the Embassy Async runtime and how cooperative multitasking though async is a viable alternative to using an operating system with threads. Additionally, how a high performance microcontroller works with external RAM and flash storage. I also intend to cover the hardware design and manufacturing process from the perspective of a software engineer rather than an electrical engineer.

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