"To the Stratosphere and Beyond: Rust at 100,000ft"
summary
Argues that moving student projects from 8‑bit Arduinos to 32‑bit microcontrollers with Rust dramatically reduces setup friction and runtime bugs: using rust-toolchain.toml plus a configured runner makes toolchains and flashing reproducible on Windows, resulting builds often fit in ~10 KB of flash versus ~30 KB for the Arduino equivalent, Rust’s no_std environment and explicit panic handling prevent silent failures common with Arduino libraries, and telemetry for pico balloons (solar/supercap powered) is easier to express than with C++ while async remains optional.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:11Choosing microcontrollers
- 2:41Balloon types and data
- 4:35Payload data logging
- 7:07Student computer challenges
- 9:45Rust as a solution
- 11:27Rust project implementation
- 13:56Error handling philosophy
- 19:12Anatomy of Rust firmware
- 26:38Clean code practices
- 29:49Pico balloons and Rust
- 32:28Python and closing remarks
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