Installing Rust on C.H.I.P.

18 July 2016

Yesterday I tweeted that I had successfully installed Rust on my C.H.I.P. computer. @LeMoussel replied asking for a tutorial, so here goes:

Step 1: Connect to C.H.I.P.

My C.H.I.P. is running the Headless v4.4 Debian image. I connected to it using a serial console over USB, as described in the documentation.

To do this, connect your C.H.I.P. to a computer (I'm using macOS in these examples) via a USB cable. Give C.H.I.P. a moment to boot up, then look for it's tty device on your computer:

$ ls /dev/tty.*
/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port /dev/tty.usbmodem1423

Here we can see the /dev/tty.usbmodem1423 device has appeared.

Connect to C.H.I.P. using screen. You will be prompted for a username and password. Login as the chip user (the password is also chip by default — you should change this):

$ screen /dev/tty.usbmodem1423 115200
Debian GNU/Linux 8 chip ttyGS0

chip login: chip
Password:
Last login: Mon Jul 18 05:32:52 UTC 2016 on ttyGS0
Linux chip 4.4.11-ntc #1 SMP Sat May 28 00:27:07 UTC 2016 armv7l

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
chip@chip:~$

Step 2: Get Online

To download packages and installation files your C.H.I.P. will need to be connected to the internet. If you haven't already done so, set up a WiFi connection using the instructions on the C.H.I.P. website.

Note: You'll need to prefix the nmcli commands with sudo.

Step 3: Install Prerequisites

To compile Rust programs you will need a linker installed. I installed clang to satisfy this dependency. It's also likely you'll want clone git repos, so let's install git too:

sudo apt install clang git-core

Step 4: Install Rust

To install Rust, we'll use [rustup]. rustup makes it easy to manage multiple versions of Rust and keep them up to date. The usual caveats about piping curl into a shell aside, follow the instructions on the rustup website:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

After the installer has finished, source the env file as it suggests. Then test out your handiwork:

$ source ~/.cargo/env
$ rustc --version
rustc 1.10.0 (cfcb716cf 2016-07-03)

Optional Hello World Example:

$ cargo new --bin hello
$ cd hello
$ cargo run
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///home/chip/hello)
     Running `target/debug/hello`
Hello, world!

You're now ready to build Rust programs on your C.H.I.P!