I know what you mean. I’ve been doing higher level development for a couple decades and only now really getting into embedded stuff the past year or two. I dislike a lot of what C makes necessary when dealing with memory and controlling interrupts to avoid data races.
I see rust officially supported on newer ARM Cortex processors and that sounds like it would be an awesome environment. But I’m not about to stake these projects with a hobbyist library for the 8-bit AVR processors I’m actually having to use.
Unfortunately I just have to suck it up and understand how the ECU works at the processor/instruction level and it’s fine until there are better tools (or I get to use better processors).
ETA: I’ve thought also that most of the avr headers are just register definitions and simple macros, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to convert them to rust myself? But then it’s my library that’s probably broken lol
They are a good fit here and my wife and I use ours a lot, but they are still early in traffic-calming efforts so it can be dicey actually getting to trails even on low-speed residential streets (drivers seem pretty aggressive and impatient here).
You are lucky if streets have a bike lane (but some places downtown have separated lanes which is sweet). The more common thing you’ll see is multi-use streets, which is just a picture of a bike painted on the street and does literally nothing to calm the kind of SUV/Dodge Ram drivers you’re most worried about. That said there are official bike routes pretty much anywhere in the city.
Property crime is also pretty high so I’m still nervous about bringing them anywhere I’ll be away from it for an extended period, too. (Even though to a bike thief it ends up just being a really heavy manual bike, I am not sure enough that they care.)
Some of this sentiment is probably because my wife and I have only been urban biking for about six months and we’ll figure it out eventually, I wish there were better resources to gauge this concerns from fellow cyclists and not the city.
All in all I think the city planners are doing a good job to encourage biking and e-bikes with policy and changes to infrastructure, but it still has some ways to go.