Skip to content

My graduation cap runs Rust

6.5 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth
6
novelty
6
actionability
4
community
7
strategic
2
personal
8

Scored daily by a customisable AI persona to surface the most relevant engineering leadership news.

Fun Rust embedded project, demonstrates skill but low strategic impact; high community engagement.

2026-05-13 languages Hacker News (100+)
My graduation cap runs Rust
Summary

Using Rust on a Digispark ATtiny85, a developer created a graduation cap that lights WS2812B LEDs when a reed switch detects tassel movement, requiring forked avr-hal and ws2812-avr crates for ATtiny85 support. The 2-hour coding and 3-hour hardware project is open-sourced on GitHub, though the author opted not to wear it to graduation.

Key Takeaway

Consider Rust for embedded projects even on low-end MCUs like ATtiny85, but be prepared to fork and patch HAL crates for unsupported targets.

Why it matters

This project demonstrates Rust's viability for embedded systems on constrained microcontrollers, a key consideration for senior engineers evaluating Rust for IoT or firmware work.