I am aware that embedded-hal has got to do with writing generic drivers, does this mean writing low level code for a specific device (for example a laser sensor)?
Am I able to use it to do normal programming using this crate just like with the Arduinio code to accomplish a task, for example lets say that I want an LED light bulb to turn on for 4 seconds and then turn off for a 4 seconds and the cycle repeats?
If you are familiar with the idea of Dependency Injection, the embedded-hal serves as a collection of common interfaces the ecosystem can build on.
It's a really powerful abstraction and helps to make your code 1) platform-agnostic, and 2) testable (i.e. you can write software tests to test your business logic without bringing in the complexity of interacting with real hardware).
Yes. For something small like an arduino project you could create an OutputPin for you device, for example the 0'th pin in GPIO A, stm32f30x_hal::gpio::gpioa::PA0, and then set it high/low as you wish. You just need to pull in the embedded_hal::digital::v2::OutputPin trait to get access to those methods.
However, the embedded-hal's full power starts to show as you build larger applications with more components.
The idea is that some library author will be able to make their code generic over an interface (e.g. an output pin representing an LED) and have it work regardless of whether the underlying OutputPin is a GPIO on your chip, a device over I2C, or the Linux GPIO subsystem.
Then as an application author, you can create an OutputPin which is connected to your LED and create a Periodic CountDown timer, then pass them to some generic blinky function/crate which will implement the blinking logic.
What normally happens is the low-level code gets pushed into the implementation for your particular OutputPin implementation, so you may write a Stm32GpioPin that does the usual register bashing to toggle GPIO states.
Often these "drivers" will get pulled out into their own crate (e.g. see the linux implementation).
So can this be written exactly the same for both the Arduino and for the Raspberry Pi (or for an alternative)? Is this what you mean?
Yes.
You make your business logic generic over a particular embedded-hal trait, then it won't care if it's talking to Arduino hardware, Raspberry Pi, or some in-memory simulator you've written for debugging purposes.
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