Useful Resources

Throughout this book, we’ve been learning Copper by building projects step by step. But the copper-rs repository itself is a goldmine of resources that go far beyond what we’ve covered. This chapter is a guided tour of where to find documentation, examples, and tools in the copper-rs repository.

Official documentation

The Copper project maintains a documentation site with detailed guides on every aspect of the framework:

copper-project.github.io/copper-rs

Here are the most useful pages:

Page	What you’ll find
Copper Application Overview	Full walkthrough of a task graph and runtime
Copper RON Configuration Reference	Complete schema for `copperconfig.ron`
Task Lifecycle	Detailed explanation of `new`, `start`, `process`, `stop`
Modular Configuration	Includes, parameter substitution, composition
Build and Deploy	Building for different targets and deploying
Supported Platforms	What hardware and OS combinations are supported
Baremetal Development	Running Copper on microcontrollers without an OS
Available Components	Catalog of drivers, algorithms, and bridges
FAQ	Common questions and answers

Bookmark the configuration reference in particular – it’s the definitive source for every field you can put in copperconfig.ron.

The examples/ directory

The repository ships with a large collection of working examples. Each one is a complete, buildable project with its own copperconfig.ron, task implementations, and main.rs. When you want to learn a new feature, reading the corresponding example is often the fastest way to understand how it works in practice.

Browse them at github.com/copper-project/copper-rs/tree/master/examples, or run any example from the repository root:

cargo run -p cu_missions

Project templates

We used cu_project (Chapter 3) and cu_full (Chapter 15) to scaffold our projects, but the templates directory has more to offer:

templates/
├── cu_project/     # Simple single-crate project
├── cu_full/        # Multi-crate workspace with components
└── README.md       # Detailed usage guide

The templates/README.md documents all available cargo generate options, including how to use the cunew alias and the just gen-workspace / just gen-project shortcuts.

Docker images

The support/docker/ directory contains Dockerfiles for building Copper projects in containerized environments:

Dockerfile.ubuntu – Standard Ubuntu-based build environment
Dockerfile.ubuntu-cuda – Ubuntu with CUDA support for GPU-accelerated tasks

These are useful for CI pipelines or for building on machines where you don’t want to install the full Rust toolchain.

Cross-compilation support

The support/ directory also includes helpers for cross-compiling and deploying to embedded targets:

just cross-armv7-deploy     # Build and deploy to ARMv7 (e.g., Raspberry Pi)
just cross-riscv64-deploy   # Build and deploy to RISC-V 64

These commands build release binaries for the target architecture and scp them to the robot along with the copperconfig.ron.

The Discord

Finally, the Copper project has an active Discord server where you can ask questions, share your projects, and get help from the community and the framework authors.

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