sat-rs/satrs-example-stm32f3-disco

sat-rs example for the STM32F3-Discovery board

This example application shows how the sat-rs framework can be used on an embedded target. It also shows how a relatively simple OBSW could be built when no standard runtime is available. It uses RTIC as the concurrency framework.

The STM32F3-Discovery device was picked because it is a cheap Cortex-M4 based device which is also used by the Rust Embedded Book and the Rust Discovery book as an introduction to embedded Rust.

If you would like to access the ITM log output, you need to connect the PB3 pin to the CN3 pin of the SWD header like shown here.

Pre-Requisites

Make sure the following tools are installed:

1. openocd: This is the debug server used to debug the STM32F3. You can install this from xPacks. You can also use the one provided by a STM32Cube installation.
2. A debugger like arm-none-eabi-gdb or gdb-multiarch.

Preparing Rust and the repository

Building an application requires the thumbv7em-none-eabihf cross-compiler toolchain. If you have not installed it yet, you can do so with

rustup target add thumbv7em-none-eabihf

A default .cargo config file is provided for this project, but needs to be copied to have the correct name. This is so that the config file can be updated or edited for custom needs without being tracked by git.

cp def_config.toml config.toml

The configuration file will also set the target so it does not always have to be specified with the --target argument.

Building

After that, assuming that you have a .cargo/config.toml setting the correct build target, you can simply build the application with

cargo build

Flashing and Debugging from the command line

Make sure you have openocd and itmdump installed first.

1. Configure a runner inside your .cargo/config.toml file by uncommenting an appropriate line depending on the application you want to use for debugging
2. Start openocd inside the project folder. This will start openocd with the provided openocd.cfg configuration file.
3. Use cargo run to flash and debug the application in your terminal
4. Use itmdump -F -f itm.txt to print the logs received from the STM32F3 device. Please note that the PB3 and CN3 pin of the SWD header need to be connected for this to work.

Debugging with VS Code

The STM32F3-Discovery comes with an on-board ST-Link so all that is required to flash and debug the board is a Mini-USB cable. The code in this repository was debugged using openocd and the VS Code Cortex-Debug plugin. Make sure to install this plugin first.

Sample configuration files are provided inside the vscode folder. Use cp vscode .vscode -r to use them for your project.

Some sample configuration files for VS Code were provided as well. You can simply use Run and Debug to automatically rebuild and flash your application.

The tasks.json and launch.json files are generic and you can use them immediately by opening the folder in VS code or adding it to a workspace.

If you would like to use a custom GDB application, you can specify the gdb binary in the following configuration variables in your settings.json:

• "cortex-debug.gdbPath"
• "cortex-debug.gdbPath.linux"
• "cortex-debug.gdbPath.windows"
• "cortex-debug.gdbPath.osx"

Commanding with Python

When the SW is running on the Discovery board, you can command the MCU via a serial interface, using COBS encoded PUS packets.

It is recommended to use a virtual environment to do this. To set up one in the command line, you can use python3 -m venv venv on Unix systems or py -m venv venv on Windows systems. After doing this, you can check the venv tutorial on how to activate the environment and then use the following command to install the required dependency:

pip install -r requirements.txt

The packets are exchanged using a dedicated serial interface. You can use any generic USB-to-UART converter device with the TX pin connected to the PA3 pin and the RX pin connected to the PA2 pin.

A default configuration file for the python application is provided and can be used by running

cp def_tmtc_conf.json tmtc_conf.json