Rust on Espressif chips – 15-07-2022 | Hacker News Reader

Rust on Espressif chips – 15-07-2022

mabez.dev

186 pointsmabez33 comments

The Espressif Rust work is super exciting. For those who don't know, they actually hired the guy working on it, and now he works on it full time and with the team who does the C/C++ support. It's also super cool how interoperable the Rust embedded ecosystem is.

I think they actually ended up hiring a couple folks (2-3?) from the open source project. Pretty awesome to see them supporting existing work!

Exciting indeed, as this is a high quality effort. What gets me most excited is the async work being done around Embassy, which has the potential to revolutionize bare-metal programming once it graduates to stable. The cool-aid:

- https://embassy.dev/

- https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/65/async-rust-vs-rtos-showdown

Yeah, async makes so much sense for embedded. Async is often billed as "for IO", but really that's only because IO requires waiting for an external hardware peripheral (the disk) to do something, leaving the CPU free to do other things in the meantime. And embedded is mostly dealing with (and often waiting for) external hardware peripherals!

FWIW I've very recently gotten https://github.com/ivmarkov/rust-esp32-std-demo (which is a pretty comprehensive demo) running on a TinyPICO (w/ESP32) and am looking forward to building out my own projects next.

What's everyone's read on how successful the new pi pico W is going to be?

Undoubtedly the pi pico W will take some amount of mindshare away from Espressif, but espressif still has several advantages that are important to me (ESPHome, usb-c board availability, ease of creating custom PCBs with their small all-in-one modules, RISC-V), but the gap will close, and my worry is that the might of the Pi community will basically just make it the more well-supported chip in the long run.

I know it's impossible to predict the future, but after the announcement, I find myself a little less excited to continue investing in keeping up with the esp32 stuff, even though right now I have something like 10 boards automating various parts of my home

(note this is from the lens of a tinkerer, not someone using these professionally)

For the tinkerer space, I think it will depend on the SDK and docs, as well as availability. Pi's tend to sell out, and it's hard to build a community on hardware you can't get. Not sure what availability of esp32's is like at the moment.

esp32 is faster than a Pico, but a lot of the examples for the Pico are in MicroPython, so I don't think performance is what they're pushing anyways.

I still like the esp32 better. It's faster for a pretty negligible difference in power consumption, I already kind of know the API, and I can get them with cameras and SD card slots already in them. I just don't see a compelling reason to switch.

I think esp32 will be fine, at least until something significantly better comes along and kills the esp32 and Pico.

The pi pico w has the huge issue of not integrating it all into a small module/chip. You can (at least right now) only buy the whole pi pico w for integration into a project, so anything remotely size constrained will not be able to use it.

Part of what makes esphome/tasmota/... so attractive is reusing existing devices with an esp inside. These won't exist for the pico w.

I think the enthusiast IoT space will continue to primarily use esp32/esp8266 devices.

If the Pi foundation offers a small module akin to the esp8266/esp32 modules, that might change.

Yeah that's precisely what I meant when I said "ease of creating custom PCBs with their small all-in-one modules" -- the pico-mini modules (I only now realize they're both called pico) and the C3 modules with antennas are just crazy for what they pack in such a small footprint.

I suspect they'll both be pretty successful, and what we'll see is a growth in the market for this kind of product.

Pi pico is already working with esphome. Though it might still be in beta.

Interesting that Espressif recently announced they are moving exclusively to RISC-V[1]. This will likely drive costs down even further, but unsure if they will improve on the power efficiency in the near term. The ESP32-C3 is mentioned in the esp-rs[2].

[1] https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-...

[2] https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-hal/pull/76

Makes sense, its not bound by the xtensa license which prevents open source disclosure of the jtag interface (there are probably other reasons, but I know xtensa isn't compatible w/open source)

Espressif is based in Shanghai. China nationally is moving to RISC-V & red linux for all internal cases so they aren't reliant on foreign tech/ip. Espressif makes products for the ccp (I'd wager it is their single largest client and probably directly influencing their board, but that is speculation). Most chip manufacturers work pretty close with their govs for biz.

Its hard to appreciate today how significant a role esp32 will play in future computing trends (but it is probably HUGE imho, i love their products and transparency)

Espressif guy here. Please share proof we make stuff for the CCP specifically? Because I'm not sure I want to work for them if they influence any technical decisions.

Btw.. I don't think the ccp is evil or whatever. Espressif is a Chinese company, based in Shanghai requires a operation business license. They are under ccp jurisdiction. The relationship with the china gov is either cozy (at executive level) or they can't have banking, internet, etc.

I could make the same statement about huawei, alibaba, et al.

However I don't want to be accused of being a liar.

Who/What was the application/client for the aithink (a division of espressif) esp32-cam board

The application is/was ccp military & ccp dystopia-esque long range surveillance tech.

Its not a dev board, it was designed for a specific application.

You can find references to the models in the Chinese (mandarin) version of the docs. The cameras which include night vision & heat can be found on taobao, have esp32-cam inside.

I think these esp32 + rust updates are really exciting! I just noticed that the temperature logger project linked to in the post[0] is also using MQTT -- I've been waiting for a rust-based ESP32+wifi+MQTT solution! EDIT: looks like this is the mqtt dependency: https://github.com/BlackbirdHQ/mqttrust

[0]: https://github.com/bjoernQ/esp32-rust-nostd-temperature-logg...

Wow! awesome news, I just bought a feather with esp32 to start playing with rust, and I'm considering taking the course from ferreous-system. Nice to see the progress by the community and how nice it looks developing for these devices. I remember having to do the same with C when I was studying in the university and it was a whole different story.

Damn, an event loop with auto-sleep! This would have been very useful a few years ago when the ESP32 didn't have enough memory for the needed stack space and coded a shitty custom one. This is tarting to get interesting.

Nice.

They mention a rust dev kit. Does this mean you can use rust on the standard espressif esp32 devkits? I just bought an espressif esp32-S3-wroom to learn on and would love to use rust if possible.

There is a specific dev kit which is used in training materials[0] (the training is paid, but the material is all online for free), but you can use Rust with any ESP32 (xtensa or risc-v based).

The main esp-rs github organization[1] is a good place to get started!

[0]: https://espressif-trainings.ferrous-systems.com/

[1]: https://github.com/esp-rs

There's also the ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 [0] which you can do the trainings with albeit making sure you mind that the pinouts are slightly different.

[0]: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32c...

There is presently no jtag debugger support for S2 chip (due to xtensa not wanting their IP to be public/open sourced by espressif who only licensed the ip for internal use) The jtag interface needs to be reverse engineered.

You can target the s2 and flash it using cargo.

However if you are building something complex and want to use Probe-rs you will probably want to buy a c3 module.

Also you can emulate and test the riscv in qemu. (useful for integration testing on cloud)

Rust for embedded is awesome and doesn't get enough attention for how powerful the potential is.

The ESP / ESP32 series chips are just astonishingly useful for their price. You can build out a device with a camera / wifi for incredibly cheap with them.

the main complaint i keep seeing about them is their power inefficiency

the interfaces are also not really "good" the cameras supported for example are quite small

a random general purpose MCU is not really meant to handle cameras, this is kinda abuse of the MCU.

No, that is at best partially incorrect. Worst case wrong.

Esp32-s2 has 3 low power sleep suspend modes. For the speed of the dual 240mhz processors are monsters with ~4mb of ram. Xtensa core is among best in class, but could be overkill for the application wheres STM, etc. might have a smaller much lower frequency chip that is. A lot of the esp32 dev boards also have bigger than necessary "protect the processor" type components which burn power too.

Raspberry pi burns way more power than esp32 per clock cycle (its a little toaster) but nobody complains about that.

I suspect the complaints are by hobbyists using arduino on s2 which can't/dont access them. (requires c++)

Riscv as architecture is not power efficient yet, give it time - the fact riscv exists at all still blows my mind.

There are several power saving levels available on the ESP32. At the deepest power saving level, it's actually quite efficient, but it will also have shut off power to the RAM, meaning that if the device wakes from a timer or an interrupt, it has to do a fresh boot. There is a power saving level where the RAM is kept powered but most of the rest is powered down, and that is the one that is less efficient than some of the competition, so if you require that then you'll get a lot less battery life time. It's somewhat better in the latest ESP32 models.

Espressif really has a fun ecosystem - I built status lights for our team using tiny pico and a bunch of Neopixels from adafruit. Very nice with Wi-Fi to setup

Putting a proprietary Chinese-manufactured chip in the critical supply chain for a product you're designing isn't a good way to future proof your business.

That's an interesting perspective. Right now, though it seems like your only argument is "China". Perhaps you expand on what you think the problems you'd see in the future would be for this, and present some alternatives (which chips are manufactured outside China these days)

China right now is largely headed for collapse with ever increasing prices of Chinese parts and ever growing debt burden growing at a faster rate than the economy and a rapidly aging population, probably the most in the world. They've got a decade at best left as a semi-modern country before they start to regress.

If your business could be stolen by cheap Chinese knockoffs, I guess your product must be reevaluated.

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