On November 20, 2025, the Zephyr community gathered in person at the Siemens Technology Center Garching for an evening of presentations and networking focused on Zephyr RTOS and its use cases. The meetup ran from 5:00 pm to 9:30 pm and brought together Zephyr contributors, embedded engineers, IoT developers, students, and open source enthusiasts from across the region.
The event took place the same week as productronica 2025 and the ELISA Workshop Munich 2025, giving many visitors a chance to combine multiple community and industry events during their stay in the Munich area.
Session Highlights:
The evening started with welcome drinks and snacks, followed by a welcome note and presentation from the host team Siemens.
Expanding Siemens Open Source engagement -Dominik Tacke, Principal Key Expert – Smart Field Devices & Marion Deveaud, Research Group Manager – Open Source Embedded Systems
Marion Deveaud and Dominik Tacke from Siemens showed how the company is strengthening its open source engagement, especially around embedded Linux and Zephyr.
Marion opened the session with insights into the meetup location and a retrospective on Siemens’ long-term commitment to open source development, particularly in embedded Linux systems. Dominik then walked through ongoing R&D activities in smart field devices, explaining why Zephyr is gaining traction within Siemens. He showcased industrial use cases, highlighted Siemens’ active role in the collaborative development effort, and pointed to career opportunities at Siemens for engineers interested in embedded Linux and open source topics at Siemens.
Their talks showed that large industrial players are not just using open source technologies, but are actively investing in the communities and talent they depend on. Slides here.
Welcome note & State of the Zephyr project – Kate Stewart, Linux Foundation
Next Kate, walked attendees through recent project milestones, community growth, and what’s coming next for Zephyr, highlighting its role as a flexible, production-ready RTOS for a wide range of devices and industries. Kate also looked ahead to Zephyr’s 10-year anniversary next year, inviting the community to celebrate how far the project has come and to help shape its next decade. Slides here.
Getting started on low power optimization with Zephyr, Tobias Meyer, Engineering Manager – Device, Konux GmbH
Tobias showed how to get started with measuring and reducing power consumption on Zephyr-based boards covering practical steps to understand a device’s baseline usage and techniques to reach low-power operation while the system is still doing useful work. Slides here.
The use of LiteX (an Open Source SoC Builder) with Zephyr, Fin Maaß, Embedded Software Developer, Vogl Electronic GmbH
Fin introduced FPGAs and their use cases, explained how LiteX and migen can be used to build system-on-chips, and walked through integrating LiteX-based SoCs with Zephyr. He also shared the current status of LiteX support in Zephyr and how this combination enables flexible, custom hardware platforms. Slides here.
Zephyr in Practice: Mapping Functional Architectures to Zephyr, Tobias Kaestner, Solution Architect Medical IoT, inovex
In his talk on “Zephyr in Practice: Mapping Functional Architectures to Zephyr,” Tobias Kaestner walked through how to move from a functional architecture to a concrete implementation in Zephyr without getting lost in the framework’s many options. He showed how Kconfig and Devicetree can be used to model system features effectively, how core Zephyr system services and native design patterns support clean designs, how reusable services can be built on top of Zephyr’s component model, and how emulation helps speed up development and strengthen testing.
Quiz, Board giveaways & Closing Remarks
After Tobias’ talk, the evening shifted into a more interactive mode with a fun quiz led by Jonas Remmert (SMIGHT GmbH). The winners were excited to receive Zephyr supported boards, generously sponsored by Microchip and STMicroelectronics, and many were excited to add them to their growing hardware collections.
Susan Remmert (Zephyr Project) wrapped up the agenda with closing remarks, encouraging everyone to stay active in the Zephyr community through working groups, committees, the ambassador program, and other opportunities to contribute, learn, and share knowledge.
The meetup concluded with networking.
Thanks to:
A big thank you goes to the Siemens Technology Center Garching team for providing the venue, hosting the event, and taking care of food and beverages. Many thanks as well to Microchip and STMicroelectronics for sponsoring the board giveaways. We also want to thank all the speakers who shared their insights and all the attendees who took the time to join us for this meetup.
Photos from the event are available on Flickr.
About the community meetups:
This meetup is part of the Zephyr Community Meetup Series, gatherings hosted by community members, with support from the Zephyr Project.
If you are excited about the Zephyr Project and want to share it with your local community, consider hosting an event in your city. Whether you are in Munich or halfway across the globe, we encourage passionate individuals to get involved. Reach out to us and explore how you can bring Zephyr to your community and make a difference in the world of IoT development.
To keep up to date about the project, subscribe to the Zephyr quarterly newsletter or connect with us on @ZephyrIoT, Zephyr Project LinkedIn or the Zephyr Discord Channel to talk with community and TSC members.