Mark

Getting Started with Rust - Raspberry Pi VS Code Extension - Embedded Developer Using the Raspberry Pi Visual Studio Code extension to create a Rust application for the RP2350.

First impressions creating an embedded Rust application for the RP2350 using the Raspberry Pi VS Code extension:

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/11/gett...

Getting Started with Rust - Enums - Embedded Developer Using enums in Rust with data and method implementations.

The enums chapter 6 of The Rust Programming Language hinted at methods implemented against an enum implementation. Had to do some research on how to use methods:

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/11/gett...

Affinity Photo has always been a good value rival to Photoshop. I have been using it to edit my photos for 10 years.

Now Affinity Photo is part of Affinity Studio and it is free. You only pay if you want the Canva AI features.

www.affinity.studio

C/C++ Constness - Embedded Developer Constant pointers and data is C/C++

I find writing about something helps with remembering so let's see if this helps me remember where const should go in a C++ function declaration as I always have to double check:

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/11/c-c-...

Develop embedded firmware for Pico using Rust or Zephyr with pico-vscode - Raspberry Pi Set up an embedded firmware project on Pico in minutes using Rust or Zephyr, now integrated into our official pico-vscode extension.

Interesting announcement from Raspberry Pi, Rust in VS Code for the Pico:

www.raspberrypi.com/news/develop...

Getting Started with Rust - Ownership, Borrowing and References - Embedded Developer Ownership, borrowing, structures, methods and references in Rust.

Still getting to know the Rust programming language, this week Ownership, Borrowing, Structs and References.

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/10/gett...

Currently learning Rust and week one has been an easy enough start. Week two is going to take me into the realm of ownership and that is going to be a little more taxing.

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/10/gett...

I never knew brew had analytics built in and turned on by default.

Time for a change:

brew analytics off

Not saying they are watching you but...

Managing your profile README - GitHub Docs You can add a README to your GitHub profile to tell other people about yourself.

How to add an extended personal profile to your GitHub landing page:

docs.github.com/en/account-a...

Everyday is a learning day

One size fits all - madness that way lies.

Fun and games with the Raspberry Pi Imager. The current release 1.9.6 does not allow username / password login over SSH.

Took several hours to find the solution.

Solution: Downgrade to 1.8.5.

So sad to hear about Jim Lovell.

Always good to hear @scott.hanselman.com speak. This talk is fantastic covering tech; what was promised, what was delivered and how we need to assess what we consume.

Loved this article, been trying to get QEMU working with Espressif chips (on and off) for a while.

In my experience with LLMs and coding we have a 50/25/25 Rule:

50% of the time - Great code that works
25% of the time - OK, I'll just add a few corrections / tweaks
25% of the time - The code is rubbish

Still, I can read and correct faster than I can type 200 lines of new code.

M5Stack Unveils Tab5 – A Powerful, ESP32-P4 Based Industrial Touch Terminal with Multimedia, Multi-Protocol, and Modular Capabilities May 9, 2025 – M5Stack, a leader in modular IoT and embedded development platforms, unveils Tab5, a next-generation 5-inch smart touch terminal powered by the advanced 400MHz ESP32-P4 dual-core RISC-V ...

Interesting new product M5Stack Tab 5, dual core RIAC-V P5 processor with WiFi Co-processor.

shop.m5stack.com/blogs/news/m...

YouTube video by Memfault Interrupt Live: James Munns | Bare Metal Rust

Recording now up! Thanks again to the @memfault.com folks for having me!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH71...

Read that a while ago, interesting, and sometimes disturbing, book.

Three SPI Busses Are One Too Many on This Cheap Yellow Display Hackaday Article

Three SPI Busses Are One Too Many on This Cheap Yellow Display

Isometric image of a white PLC box with a Praysio logo, screen, buttons, USB plug and wire terminal plugs for RS458, MBUS, Ethernet, etc.

Loving this beautiful Praysio industrial machine monitoring device built on Meadow!

Started to use a Cheap Yellow Display and hit a problem with using LCD, Touch sensor and SD Card at the same time.

Small hardware modification fixed the issue:

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/03/chea...

Interesting that you have to use addr2line. The last time I was using heap tracing I used the command "idf.py monitor" in a terminal to run my application. The script then decoded all of the tracebacks from the standalone heap trace output automatically.

The heap tracking tools in IDF are fairly good. The standalone mode works well for me but is limited to the amount of memory on the board.

Logging to host has no memory constraints but I found it did not reconcile the calls to free with those to malloc.

nRF52840 Does Not Appear as a Wireshark Interface - Embedded Developer Recent work has been heading towards Bluetooth software enhancement on the ESP32. The basic design of the system follows the classic server (central) and peripheral model. The ESP device is acting as ...

Recently had problems getting a nRF52840 dongle sniffing BLE traffic and sending it to Wireshark on MacOS.

TLDR; Python versions and virtual environments got in the way.

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2025/01/nrf5...

USB with Docker on Windows and macOS Now Possible: What You Need to Know - Golioth Hardware developers have missed out on the benefits of Docker and similar localized container solutions for one big reason: USB. Today we're seeing how devices can start to reliably connect from the h...

Docker access to USB ports on Windows and MacOS, now this could be interesting...

blog.golioth.io/usb-docker-w...

Repeatable Deployments 3 - Adding NVMe Drive Automatically - Embedded Developer Using Ansible to add a new NVMe drive attached to the Pimoroni NVMe Base to a Raspberry Pi allowing for repeatable deployment.

Time to automate the addition of a SSD for data storage to the Raspberry Pi using the @pimoroni.com NVMe Base.

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2024/07/repe...

Me: I want a regex to replace [' and '] wrapped around this text...

ChatGPT: Let me help you with this..., try '\\[\\'|\\'\\]', ''

Me: This generates a template error

ChatGPT: Lets add more escaping, try '\\\\[\\\\'|\\\\'\\\\]', ''

Me: Hello Stackoverflow

Repeatable Deployments Part 2 - NVMe Base - Embedded Developer Adding a NVMe base to a Raspberry Pi ready for a repeatable deployment and setup.

Took delivery of @pimoroni.com NVMe Base (and Duo) a few weeks ago. Nice board.

Want to set the base up as a file store (not a bootable) drive - here's how you do it:

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2024/06/repe...

Docker File Sharing - Embedded Developer Resolution of an issue created through the file sharing option in a docker container where changes on the host system were not being reflected in the mounted volume.

Had some trouble with docker volumes this week:

blog.mark-stevens.co.uk/2024/06/dock...