Part 1: Lay of the Land

~60-75 min

Before we touch any hardware, we need to build a mental model. This part covers everything you need to understand before you start writing embedded Rust code — and more importantly, it gives you a framework for learning anything new in the ecosystem after this workshop is over.

Who Am I?

I'm Omar Hiari — The Embedded Rustacean.

• Embedded engineer with years of experience in industry and academia
• Author of books on embedded Rust
• Publisher of The Embedded Rustacean newsletter
• Creator of the uFerris learning platform you're holding right now
• Over 100 blog posts at blog.theembeddedrustacean.com

The Problem

Embedded Rust is exciting. The ecosystem is growing fast. But that growth creates a real challenge for learners:

• Tutorials go stale. APIs change. Examples that worked six months ago might not compile today.
• Examples cover one use case. A blinky tutorial shows you how to blink one LED on one pin. But what if you need a different pin? A different configuration? A different peripheral entirely?
• Copy-paste gets you started, but doesn't get you far. If you can only reproduce what someone else wrote, you're stuck the moment you need something slightly different.

Why Are You Here?

You're going to learn how to fish, not just eat fish.

After this workshop, you'll know how to:

• Navigate the embedded Rust ecosystem
• Read documentation effectively
• Adapt examples to any use case — not just the one in the tutorial

What I'm Going to Teach You

A mental model that works for every peripheral, every HAL, every driver crate:

Create → Configure → Control

And how to find the answers in the docs when nobody wrote a tutorial for your exact use case.

Let's start with the ecosystem.