The STM32F401 Boards
A while ago, a user posted a link to this repo on /r/mk.
The madlad had written firmware for a handmade mechanical keyboard in Rust.
I absolutely loved this idea and wanted to get the chip that runs it myself. It was the STM32F401 board running the Arm Cortex-M4 processor.
Check this thing out! It has the Armv7 architecture and runs at 84MHz with a performance of 105 DMIPS/285 CoreMark.
For comparison, the Espressif ESP8266 reaches 80MHz and gets a score of 191, while the ESP32 is at 160MHz and a Coremark of 661.
The STM32F401 costs the same as the ESP8266 and I obviously would be running Rust on it, so I should get much better performance.
And the STM comes with USB-C! I should measure the power draw.
And AliExpress had it. Delivery took a couple of months but I finally received them last month. I am going to get busy hacking a rudimentary implementation of this guy’s firmware onto this.
I wanted to build a programmable dial into an Altoids box, so perhaps I’ll do that. Time to find a dial though!