Advice on building under Visual Studio on Windows

[BitLoose]

Anyone know the best way to get this building on Visual Studio?

I installed the Rust toolchain, the extension to VS for Rust, and all VS gives is errors

[sourcebox]

What happens if you just run cargo build from the command line?

[BitLoose]

I just ran the rust updates and then ran cargo build, got a few errors and then it finished, and dfu-buddy.exe runs!

It detects the H743 MCU over the USB in DFU mode, but only offers to load a .DFU file. My files are .elf, so I guess I must convert them the STMs DfuSE.

I'm going to edit your code using the Visual Studio IDE, I have no idea how that works for debugging, a complete new thing for me, hope its not going to be too painful!

Errors:-

Downloaded bytemuck_derive v1.8.1
warning: spurious network error (3 tries remaining): failed to get successful HTTP response from https://static.crates.io/crates/thiserror/1.0.69/download (151.101.194.137), got 502
body:
I/O error
warning: spurious network error (3 tries remaining): failed to get successful HTTP response from https://static.crates.io/crates/termcolor/1.4.1/download (151.101.194.137), got 502
body:
I/O error
warning: spurious network error (3 tries remaining): failed to get successful HTTP response from https://static.crates.io/crates/strum/0.26.3/download (151.101.194.137), got 502
body:
I/O error
warning: spurious network error (3 tries remaining): failed to get successful HTTP response from https://static.crates.io/crates/smol_str/0.2.2/download (151.101.194.137), got 502
body:
I/O error
warning: spurious network error (3 tries remaining): failed to get successful HTTP response from https://static.crates.io/crates/renderdoc-sys/1.1.0/download (151.101.194.137), got 502
body:
I/O error
warning: spurious network error (3 tries remaining): failed to get successful HTTP response from https://static.crates.io/crates/pkg-config/0.3.32/download (151.101.194.137), got 502
body:
I/O error

Compiling egui-winit v0.31.1
Compiling egui_glow v0.31.1
Compiling eframe v0.31.1
Finished dev profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 2m 30s

[sourcebox]

A DFU file is in fact a binary file with some metadata. You need a tool to create it from an ELF or BIN file. What most people use for Rust development is Visual Studio Code with the rust-analyzer plugin. Even if you own a full license of Visual Studio, it may be worth trying it because it's a simple setup.

The errors you get are not related to the project itself but show problems with the network connection downloading the required dependencies. I can't really help you with that, also because I'm not really a Windows user.

[sourcebox]

Here's a video that shows the setup for VS Code including debugging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhedgZtd8gw

[BitLoose]

Thanks for your help, appreciated.

I need to encrypt the binary file to make it secure. I guess I can add a decryption algorithm to your app so it can load encryote DFU files.
STM force people to use a more expensive version of their MCUs to be able to use their own inflated secure DFU api, really they make life difficult just to suck another $10 out of each MCU sale!
You could probably make good money selling your app if it handled encryption.

[sourcebox]

Can't you just encrypt the binary before converting it to the DFU file?

[BitLoose]

That's a good idea, just encode the raw binary data before converting to DFU, that would probably be transparent.
Then I can decode it in your app before programming.
What would be ideal would be to have the programmer code in the MCU handling the decryption, but I'm pushed on time to also have to write the MCU DFU code.

[sourcebox]

If you want to use encryption to provide security, then it should happen at the build stage and the decryption needs to be in the MCU. DFU Buddy is just intended to do the transfer, nothing more. When you do the decryption inside it, you break the security chain.

[BitLoose]

Absolutely, I've been looking to hire an engineer to do this, but not found anyone as yet. When I have time though, I will add it in the MCU.

[BitLoose]

Okay so with the help of CoPilot I eventually gave up on Visual Studio Rust and installed Visual Code, then the extensions etc., really, we're still using command lines!
Then the rust is nothing like C++ or Java, why did they develop this?
Message::StartUpdate => {
if !self.device_update_state.running {
let device_id = self.device_id.unwrap();
let file_path = self.dfu_file.as_ref().unwrap().path.clone();
let message_sender = self.message_channel.0.clone();
let message_sender_result = self.message_channel.0.clone();
std::thread::spawn(move || {
let result = update::full_update(device_id, file_path, message_sender);
match result {
Ok(_) => {}
Err(error) => {
message_sender_result
.send(Message::DeviceUpdateError(format!("{error}")))
.ok();

Its ugly and difficult to read unlike C++.

So I need to load the code file from an internet address, adding a drop-down so the user can select the version, but its hard to see the structure from this code