I love the Pico product line and think they are severely underutilized. Many Pi 3/4/5 projects can be performed with one of these little guys. Don’t chain yourself to a whole Linux distro unless you really need it.
zxexz 10 minutes ago [-]
What I'll never understand about this whole thing is why most people seem to easily tolerate the rigamarole of maintaining an entire host SBC OS and sending or even cross compiling binaries to it, for microprocessor work. I much prefer maintaining a dev env on machine(s) and sending and flashing a binary over the wire. Maybe I just dislike state, but the pico (and several other MCU ecosystems these days) make it so easy to
LoganDark 33 minutes ago [-]
Languages:
75.4% Linker Script
18.2% Rust
6.4% Shell
About sums up embedded development in Rust.
nevi-me 19 minutes ago [-]
Most of the code is already in libraries. rs-matter includes a lot of batteries, so for simple clusters you end up writing little code.
melastmohican 5 hours ago [-]
Hi HN,
I’ve been experimenting with the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350) and wanted to see how difficult it would be to build a fully compliant Matter smart device from scratch using Rust.
I put together a complete "Blinky" example using the rs-matter stack and the embassy async framework. It uses BLE for the initial commissioning phase and Wi-Fi for network connectivity. Once flashed, you can provision it directly into Apple Home, Google Home, or Home Assistant using your smartphone—no cloud accounts required. It exposes a standard Matter On/Off cluster that toggles a physical LED wired to the GPIO pins.
A few interesting technical notes from the build:
Bare Metal: It runs entirely no_std on bare metal using embassy-rp.
Radio Coexistence: Getting the CYW43439 wireless chip to handle concurrent BLE (for commissioning) and Wi-Fi (for Matter IP traffic) on the RP2350 took some tweaking. We actually had to dial back the PIO SPI clock divider specifically because the RP2350's faster 150MHz core clock was causing bus corruption when the radio was saturated!
Async Rust: The repo includes the full async CoEx (coexistence) runner setup to safely multiplex the radio between the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks concurrently.
If you’ve been wanting to build local-only smart home devices but felt intimidated by the massive official C++ Matter SDK, doing it in Rust is actually becoming incredibly approachable.
Would love to hear if anyone else is building custom smart home gear in Rust.
DazWilkin 4 hours ago [-]
This looks very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
MrBuddyCasino 3 hours ago [-]
> bus corruption when the radio was saturated
How do you even diagnose this?
melastmohican 2 hours ago [-]
The initial approach was to run BLE and Wi-Fi simultaneously. Provisioning sometimes worked. It seems like there was some interference. Then switched to run BLE with Wi-FI off. When I got Wi-Fi credentials, switched BLE off, and turned Wi-Fi on. It still had some issues. Turned out when slowed down SPI bus, it started working. Only tested with Home Assistant and have to fork and patch rs-matter-embassy
mrlambchop 51 minutes ago [-]
re: wifi/ble together
That sounds like the crate didn't have coexistence enabled or the defaults were really odd - so much boring stuff to write about BLE/WiFi Coex, but the short is "the default settings" are pretty good for low bandwidth IoT devices.
I'll peek at the code out of interest :)
taneq 13 minutes ago [-]
Use a digital storage scope, many of them can directly decode protocols like SPI . Then a lot of trial and error to figure out when exactly the issue happens and what else is happening around that time.
jkwang 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 05:33:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
75.4% Linker Script
18.2% Rust
6.4% Shell
About sums up embedded development in Rust.
I’ve been experimenting with the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350) and wanted to see how difficult it would be to build a fully compliant Matter smart device from scratch using Rust.
I put together a complete "Blinky" example using the rs-matter stack and the embassy async framework. It uses BLE for the initial commissioning phase and Wi-Fi for network connectivity. Once flashed, you can provision it directly into Apple Home, Google Home, or Home Assistant using your smartphone—no cloud accounts required. It exposes a standard Matter On/Off cluster that toggles a physical LED wired to the GPIO pins.
A few interesting technical notes from the build:
Bare Metal: It runs entirely no_std on bare metal using embassy-rp. Radio Coexistence: Getting the CYW43439 wireless chip to handle concurrent BLE (for commissioning) and Wi-Fi (for Matter IP traffic) on the RP2350 took some tweaking. We actually had to dial back the PIO SPI clock divider specifically because the RP2350's faster 150MHz core clock was causing bus corruption when the radio was saturated! Async Rust: The repo includes the full async CoEx (coexistence) runner setup to safely multiplex the radio between the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks concurrently. If you’ve been wanting to build local-only smart home devices but felt intimidated by the massive official C++ Matter SDK, doing it in Rust is actually becoming incredibly approachable.
Would love to hear if anyone else is building custom smart home gear in Rust.
How do you even diagnose this?
That sounds like the crate didn't have coexistence enabled or the defaults were really odd - so much boring stuff to write about BLE/WiFi Coex, but the short is "the default settings" are pretty good for low bandwidth IoT devices.
I'll peek at the code out of interest :)