Copper now also runs on baremetal microcontrollers: same robotic runtime, no OS.

Copper now runs baremetal, directly on microcontrollers, without losing any of its power as a robotics runtime. Same architecture, same tooling, same determinism, whether you deploy on a CPU or a tiny embedded chip.

Today we’re shipping our vision to microcontrollers.

Copper’s unified vision: Robots come in all shapes and forms and we want your algorithms to compile and be deployed unchanged on Linux/macOS and on MCUs (or both in tandem). Train or prototype on your workstation, deploy to the edge, then replay the exact logs back on a workstation build to debug with full tooling.

With Copper v0.10 the runtime can run on its own with no OS required! It can log straight on flash storage like an SDCard /eMMC and because Copper controls time and logs consistently, you can log replay a baremetal run on your desktop with the exact same codebase compiled as a normal Copper application.
By removing the OS middle man, Copper is getting closer to power safety critical applications with strict real time requirements.

What does this unlock?

Well, an entire new class of embedded robotic systems now becomes possible with Copper.

• Drones
  Run your flight controller directly on Copper: no need for a second companion computer just to run autonomy logic. Less weight, less complexity, one unified stack.

• Vehicle ECUs
  Most vehicles run distributed MCUs with electronic control units (ECUs). Copper now fits inside those architectures, enabling high-level functions directly on embedded control.

• “Big Brain / Small Brain” architectures
  Mix a higher-level Linux computer with multiple MCU-based controllers without changing your development workflow. Same config, same log format, same simulation, same replay. One system, end-to-end.

• AI at the edge
  Microcontrollers are getting NPUs and accelerators. Pair those with Copper and you can run sensor-near AI processing with zero messaging glue and full determinism.

• Road to safety
  Copper behaves like a compiler + runtime, not a scripting layer. Combined with baremetal (no OS or kernel), this opens a credible path toward functional safety certification.

Order a Copper Baremetal Reference platform & kit!

Hardware wise, we have selected the Pimonori Pico plus 2W as our first baremetal reference platform. It features a very well-documented RP2350B board with some beefy specs: 16 MB QSPI flash, 8 MB PSRAM, USB-C, Qwiic, and an accessible SWD debug header. It offers a great range of ready made sensors and actuators like cameras and SDCard slots.

If you want a packaged up and tested hardware kit ready to deploy Copper on with the MCU + Plate + sdcard reader + CMSIS-DAP probe + cable), ping us at info@copper-robotics.com and we’ll get you set up.

What’s next

We’ll keep building on Rust’s embedded ecosystem: sensor implementations, actuator implementations and algorithms adapted for MCU constraints, and of course new additional architectures as demand grows (e.g., ESP32).

Also, any time we have an improvement on the main stack like an improved scheduler, it will automatically translate into an improvement on the baremetal version so stay tuned!