Now we’re cooking with gas So I’ve made some significant progress since my last update. The first thing to point out is that I got a hardware debugger. For reasons that will become clear shortly, the primitive debugging techniques I outlined in my last post went from “annoying but workable” to “no longer actually possible.” I was also pleased to see that the ATMEL-ICE debugger supports various Cortex ARM processors, which I am anticipating migrating to at some point in the future. An...

This post is just an aside; As I mentioned in my last post, there is a compiler bug in LLVM that is resulting in incorrect code being generated for AVR with Rust. I made some vague assertions in a footnote about “just follow the directions and you’ll be fine” because I couldn’t remember how to do it, and then I ended up having to figure out how to rebuild my toolchain today. So I’m mostly posting these instructions for my own benefit, but maybe someone else will find them useful too. Do...

PSA: click on all the things Ok, one bit of housekeeping first: a few people complained that the animated GIFs from the last post were distracting and made it hard to read, which, as much as I hate to admit it, is actually a fair complaint. Instead of getting rid of them entirely, I’ve started sticking them in collapsible elements so that you don’t get completely overwhelmed by my wit and brilliance. Like this: I guess you could also just skip over those elements entirely since there’...

So you want to build a robot? It all started when I decided I was going to build a quadcopter. But not just any quadcopter, I was going to get all the parts and put it together myself! And then I was going to write the flight control system (in Rust, of course) so that it could fly autonomously and do tasks for me, like flying over to the front door to see who just rang my doorbell. That’s doable in a weekend, right? Right? So anyways, that’s how I found myself building a control sy...