Before you start programming, you’ll need to install some tools in order to build and upload your code. Get a command-line of your choice ready, since we’ll be running some terminal commands.

Installing Rust

In order to use vexide, you’ll need a Rust toolchain (cargo, rustc, etc…) installed on your computer. To install Rust on your system, follow the instructions here. If you use a Windows computer, the installer may also prompt you to install Visual Studio Build Tools.

Tooling

vexide uses on some unstable features that are currently only available in Rust’s nightly release channel, so you’ll need to switch to that:

rustup default nightly

We also need some additional tools to help us properly build/upload to VEX brains. You can install those components with the following terminal commands:

rustup component add rust-srccargo install cargo-v5

Setting up a Project

To make a new vexide project, we’ll use the cargo v5 new <NAME> command. This will create a project in the current directory containing a bare-bones template that we can start out with.

cargo v5 new my-project

After running this, you should have a new folder named my-project (or whatever you named your project). Open that folder in a code editor of your choice. If you don’t have a code editor, we recommend starting with Visual Studio Code or Zed.

If you’ve worked in a rust project before, this file structure should be somewhat familiar to you.

If you don’t recognize any of this, that’s okay too! There are two files of relevance we’ll worry about right now:

• The Cargo.toml file contains metadata and configuration about your project’s package. This includes your dependencies, or external libraries that you may wish to use later. This is also where you can configure your project’s name, description, and upload slot.
• Inside of the src folder is your project’s source code. That’s where the actual code for your robot goes. Everything in that folder will eventually be imported by main.rs, which contains the entrypoint of your code — the main function. We’ll look at that on the next page.

Most of the other files in the template are configuration files that tell Rust how to build projects for the V5 Brain. There’s also a set of GitHub actions for testing your project when you push to GitHub and a flake for NixOS users.