The talk will cover the following topics (as time allows):

• Dynamics of the inverted pendulum

• Motion sensors

  • Accelerometer
  • Gyroscope
  • Sensor fusion: computing the tilt angle from the sensor readings

• Motors

  • Dynamics
  • H bridge: controlling direction
  • Pulse Width Modulation (PWM): controlling speed
  • Rotary encoder: sensing speed

• Controller architecture

• Implementation

  • Sensor interfaces
  • IO abstractions & pin distribution
  • Fixed Point Arithmetic
  • Sensor noise
  • Filter design
  • Sensor calibration
  • System characterization
  • Tasks
  • Multitasking

• Logging

  • Communication over bluetooth
  • Binary (de)serialization

• Performance evaluation

  • CPU usage
  • Response times
  • Program size

I should note that I won't go in too much detail about the control engineering topics; just enough to motivate the design of the program.

The main takeaways of the talk will be:

• Rust's rich type system lets you validate parts of your program, like the system initialization, at compile time eliminating a whole class of logic bugs.

• Zero cost abstractions give you the high performance required to target microcontrollers with just a few KBs of RAM and that operate at tens of MHz.

• Memory safety enables fearless multitasking, even on a system without an OS.