Meeting 2025-03-18

[adamgreig]

This is the agenda for the next meeting. Please add anything you'd like to discuss below!

• Meetings: Tuesday 8pm Europe/Berlin time
• Join the Matrix chat
• Nominated issues
• IRC/Matrix logs

[rursprung]

i won't be around for the meeting itself, but i'd like to bring up the following point:

it'd be great if there were something similar to embedded-hal for cameras. as a very rough guesswork that'd cover different layers/components:

• low(er) level: traits for the camera chips (e.g. OV2640) on one hand (these often just control the chip - e.g. via I2C - but do not receive images), communication (e.g. MIPI CSI) on the other
• high level: a trait which you can use to "just" get some images (e.g. there could be JpegCamera & co. and the traits get implemented depending on which image types are supported) - consuming applications which aren't very demanding (i.e. they "just" want to get an image and don't care about details) can use this. and/or there could also be a struct which offers some basic functionality and accepts the lower level traits as input (all it'd have to do is to tell the chip impl to take a picture and read the result from the communication impl).

i'd imagine that the HALs would provide low-level drivers for the communication (as they sometimes already do, e.g. for esp32s3 or will soon do, e.g. for esp32: esp-rs/esp-hal#3219). camera chip specific drivers would be independent driver crates (relying on the embedded-hal i2c traits & co.) and either BSPs (where available and the camera chip is known) or applications can piece the two together.
this would make writing applications easier and would allow writing portable code / libraries which are not tied to a specific HAL/protocol/chip.

for C & C++ there's e.g. esp32-camera for ESP32 chips which allows easy access to cameras without too much chip-specific tinkering. this also isn't portable to other chip families, but that's where the embedded rust ecosystem could outshine it 🙂.
in comparison i think at the moment it's quite hard to get something done with cameras with embedded rust compared to other ecosystems (e.g. getting a web server serving images from an ESP32 camera takes less than 5 minutes when using arduino - you just use the example and plug in your WiFi details and select your board).