Ancillary Crates Overview
Before going into a detailed description of the various packages and concepts for writing an application, it might be useful to have a superficial familiarity with the whole ecosystem, both in the esp-hal sense and in the broader Embedded Rust sense.
esp-hal Ecosystem
The first step in working with a project is to create it, the main way to do this is to use esp-generate. Read more about it in the section dedicated to this tool.
The core crate that ties all work with Espressif chips in Rust is the esp-hal crate. Through it, you will be able to perform basic initialization of the chip, as well as access drivers for the peripherals available on the chip. The full esp-hal documentation for selected chip will give unambiguous information about what peripherals are available to use, and the stability of their respective drivers.
Furthermore, you may want to use more advanced functionality of the chip. For example, network and connectivity. This part of the ecosystem is the responsibility of esp-radio, which combines drivers for the communication protocols available on one or another of Espressif’s products: Wi-Fi, BLE, esp-now and low-level IEEE 802.15.4 for the lower layers of communication. More detailed information for each chip is available in the esp-radio sub-repository.
For more advanced work with chip memory and to use collections from the alloc crate in no_std that require heap allocation, you are welcome to use esp-alloc. A separate chapter in the book is devoted to this.
The table below briefly describes all crates in the esp-hal ecosystem and their purposes:
| Crate | Description | Stability |
|---|---|---|
esp-alloc | Memory allocation utilities. | Unstable |
esp-backtrace | Provides backtraces support. | Unstable |
esp-bootloader-esp-idf | Offers additional support for the ESP-IDF 2nd stage bootloader, including OTA. | Unstable |
esp-build | Build utilities for use with esp-hal and other related packages, intended for use in build scripts. | Unstable |
esp-config | Configuration system. | Unstable |
esp-hal | Bare-metal (no_std) HAL for all Espressif ESP32 devices. | Stable* |
esp-hal-proc-macros | Procedural macros for use with the esp-hal family of HAL packages. | Unstable |
esp-lp-hal | Bare-metal (no_std) HAL for the low power and ultra-low power cores found in some Espressif devices. | Unstable |
esp-metadata | Metadata for Espressif devices, primarily intended for use in build scripts. | Unstable |
esp-preempt | Threading and thread-aware synchronization primitives, primarily used for esp-radio. | Unstable |
esp-println | Print and logging functionality for Espressif devices. | Unstable |
esp-riscv-rt | Minimal startup/runtime for RISC-V CPUs from Espressif. | Unstable |
esp-rom-sys | ROM code support. | Unstable |
esp-rtos | Scheduler implementation for esp-radio, embassy support for esp-hal. | Unstable |
esp-sync | Synchronization primitives for Espressif devices. | Unstable |
esp-storage | Storage utilities for Espressif devices. | Unstable |
esp-radio | Wi‑Fi, BLE, IEEE 802.15.4, and ESP‑NOW functionality for Espressif devices. | Unstable |
xtensa-lx | Low-level access to Xtensa LX processors and peripherals. | Unstable |
xtensa-lx-rt | Minimal startup/runtime for Xtensa LX CPUs from Espressif. | Unstable |
⚠️ Note: The stability of individual peripheral drivers within
esp-halvaries. Refer to the Peripheral support section for per-peripheral stability details.
You can find details about any of these packages in the esp-rs documentation.
Embedded Rust Ecosystem Integration
The most popular Hardware Abstraction Layer in the Embedded Rust environment is embedded-hal, which provides a number of traits for several peripherals that allow writing HAL agnostic device drivers. esp-hal implements these traits within its drivers. In addition, various traits from different crates used in the embedded Rust industry have also been implemented, such as rand_core traits for our Random Number Generator (RNG) peripheral, as well as embedded-io traits, which are analogues of std::io traits for no_std applications.