In the previous part of the series we explored the embedded-hal traits and how they can be used to create platform agnostic drivers in Rust. In this part, we will focus on how we can use the FT232H breakout board to interact with our I2C device from a desktop environment.

Writing drivers that work consistently across microcontrollers, embedded Linux boards, and desktop operating systems is deceptively hard. Different HALs, conflicting abstractions, and platform-specific quirks often lead to duplicated code or forests of #ifdef blocks.

In the previous part of the series, we discussed the FT232H breakout board and how we can use it with Rust to interact with our I2C devices from a desktop environment. In this part, we will explore how we we can use our I2C driver on multiple platforms without changing any of the driver code, thanks to the embedded-hal and embedded-hal-async traits.

The Platforms

The beauty of using the embedded-hal traits is that we can write our driver code once and then use it on multiple platforms without any modifications. This is because the embedded-hal traits provide a common interface for interacting with hardware peripherals, regardless of the underlying platform. This means our vendors are responsible for implementing these traits in their HALs.