I recently saw a contest for a free raspbery pi. Somehow, this triggered many my weak spots all in one post:

  • Coding challenge - check :)
  • Free electronics - check
  • Programming language I've never used - check

The original article https://www.secondstate.io/articles/raspberry-pi-for-free-20200709/ basically says if you fork a github, update the project, then add yourself to a google form, you can get one.

Never having used rust, it was kind of interesting.

Side note on issues: I had some simple problems around my $PATH environment variable. The instructions encourage you to add the path updates to your .profile in linux. This will not update your current session, so every new terminal window will have the old path. Do yourself a favor and just logout and login after following the instructions for adding the $HOME/.cargo/bin to your $PATH.

In the sample, you use nodejs to invoke a call through WASM to code built with rust. Even though I'd never used it, I had read some articles, so had some familiarity with the toml files, and knew that cargo was their package system.

Not having any idea how to meaningfully change it, I updated mine to do lorem ipsum. Also being a bit lazy, I didn't want to WRITE the generator. I looked and of course there's a cargo package for it, so I got a chance to learn how includes, packages, import aliases, and type conversions work.

I had read that people often said that if it compiles, rust code generally works. That was my finding for this tiny example, too.

Fun project!

I might try sponsoring one sometime later.