Rust Language Milan

We are back, we're ready to rock, and this time we're bridging the gap between Rust and physical hardware! 🚂⚡

🙏 A Huge Thank You to Our Host & Co-Organizer!
A massive shout-out to Kalpa for welcoming us into their space, being super flexible with our scheduling, and making this meetup possible. We’re also thrilled to be co-organizing this event with Italian Embedded—thank you for partnering with us to bring this session to the community! 🦀⚡

🎙️ The Talk: Bare-Metal Embedded Rust

Speaker: Cristiano Chieppa

Digital model trains rely on the DCC and RailCom industry standards for digital signal generation and two-way communication. Combining his passion for railway modeling with Rust, Cristiano built a complete DCC command station running on bare-metal ESP32 hardware to generate DCC wave signals and control model locomotives!

We are super excited to have Cristiano Chieppa—a backend and embedded developer with over 30 years of software engineering experience—leading this session. After decades of managing memory leaks and unsafe code in C++, Cristiano discovered Rust three years ago and never looked back.

Cristiano will walk us through how he integrated the Z21 specification (Roco's UDP communication standard) and the complex RailCom protocol for bidirectional signal feedback.

What you’ll learn:

• Driving ESP32 hardware in bare-metal Rust with zero-cost abstractions.
• Handling real-time UDP network signals via the Z21 protocol.
• Managing complex hardware constraints and memory safety in low-level systems.

🎛️ Live Demo: An on-site demonstration featuring the digital command station and actual model trains in action!

📍 Logistics & Agenda

We're back, we're ready to experiment, and this time we're exploring how Rust and WebAssembly can make distributed applications easier to build! 🦀⚡
Ever wondered how to run the same application logic across different devices, from tiny microcontrollers to powerful servers, without having to manage all the complexity of distributed systems yourself?
What if you could focus on writing your application while a runtime takes care of communication, execution, state management, and deciding where your code should run?
Meet Myrmic: an open-source distributed runtime built with Rust and powered by WebAssembly! 🚀

## 🎙️ The Workshop: Distributed Rust & WebAssembly with Myrmic

In this session, we'll explore Myrmic, a framework designed to run distributed applications across heterogeneous edge and embedded devices.
With Myrmic, developers write small, stateful Rust components called cells, compile them to WebAssembly, and deploy them across a network of connected nodes.
Myrmic takes care of messaging, execution, state handling, and workload placement, allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.
And this time, we're not stopping at the theory!
After introducing the framework and demonstrating how it works, we'll move into a hands-on workshop where participants will build their own interactive device swarms.
From customized programs and interactive games to collaborative experiments, we'll discover how independent components can work together to create shared experiences.
What you'll learn:

• Building distributed applications using Rust and WebAssembly.
• Understanding how Myrmic's cells, nodes, and swarms work together.
• Managing messaging, state, and execution across heterogeneous devices.
• Deploying and coordinating application logic without manually managing the underlying infrastructure.
• Creating interactive applications using distributed components.

## 🎛️ Live Demo & Hands-on Workshop

We'll start with a live demonstration of Myrmic, exploring its architecture and showing how WebAssembly components can communicate and cooperate across multiple nodes.
Then it's your turn!
Participants will get hands-on experience with Myrmic, experimenting with distributed application logic and building their own interactive swarm.
Whether you're passionate about Rust, curious about WebAssembly, interested in distributed systems, or simply want to try something new, this workshop is an opportunity to learn by building!

## 📍 Logistics & Agenda

• 18:00 – 18:10: Introduction and Welcome
• 18:10 – 19:00: Myrmic Demo and Q&A
• 19:00 – 19:15: Setup Checks
• 19:15 – 20:35: Hands-on Exercise
• 20:35 – 21:00: Results and Debrief
• 21:00 onwards: Networking, Pizza & Drinks 🍕🍻