On December 4, 2025, the Zephyr Project community gathered in Karlsruhe, Germany, for an in-person meetup hosted by SMIGHT GmbH. The event brought together embedded developers, open source contributors, and industry experts for an evening of technical talks, knowledge sharing, and networking focused on real-world Zephyr applications.
The meetup was part of the Zephyr Community Meetup Series, supporting local, community-driven events around the world.
Welcome and Opening
The evening kicked off with a welcome note from Martin Sigle, Technical Lead at SMIGHT GmbH. He introduced SMIGHT, shared the company’s background, and explained how their interest in the Zephyr Project began. His opening set the stage for the event by highlighting why Zephyr plays an important role in SMIGHT’s embedded and grid-monitoring solutions.
Zephyr @ SMIGHT
The first session was delivered by Anouar Raddaoui, Embedded Software Developer at SMIGHT GmbH. He walked attendees through SMIGHT’s journey with Zephyr, showing how their grid monitoring product matured over time. The talk highlighted how Zephyr’s subsystems and capabilities have served as a reliable and evolving firmware foundation, enabling new features and long-term maintainability. Slides here.
Zephyr® in The Matrix: Total Trace for Impossible Bugs
Hugh Breslin, Subject Matter Expert at Microchip Technology, followed with a session on full-system simulation for debugging Zephyr. He demonstrated how deterministic simulation enables complete visibility into kernel execution, allowing developers to replay and analyze every instruction, interrupt, and memory access. The session showed how this approach helps uncover race conditions and hard-to-reproduce bugs that traditional debugging tools often miss.
Rapid Prototype Development Using Zephyr
Next, Artur Nidens, Freelancer at Nidens Embedded Systems Engineering, shared a real-world example of rapid prototyping with Zephyr. He described how a functional prototype for digitizing an analog utility meter was developed and delivered within weeks. The talk focused on Zephyr as a practical tool for fast prototyping rather than deep internals, highlighting its flexibility and efficiency in early-stage product development. Slides here.
Arm Serial Wire Debug Support in Zephyr
After a short break, Johann Fischer, R&D Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor, presented an overview of Arm Serial Wire Debug (SWD) support in Zephyr. He covered the SWD driver API, the GPIO bit-bang driver, and the USB DAP backend. Johann also shared guidance on building debug probe firmware and provided insights into future development plans in this area.
Zephyr in Practice: Mapping Functional Architectures to Zephyr
The final session was presented by Tobias Kaestner, Solution Architect Medical IoT at inovex GmbH. Tobias showed how to map functional system designs to Zephyr’s components and services. He demonstrated how to use Kconfig and Devicetree to model system features, leverage Zephyr’s core services, and build custom services using native design patterns—all while maintaining code quality and accelerating development. Slides here.
Quiz, Board Giveaways, and Closing Remarks
Following the talks, the meetup shifted into an interactive session with a quiz led by Jonas Remmert (SMIGHT GmbH). Winners received Zephyr-supported development boards, generously sponsored by STMicroelectronics, adding excitement and hands-on value to the evening.
Susan Remmert (Zephyr Project) closed the agenda with final remarks, encouraging attendees to stay engaged with the Zephyr community through working groups, the ambassador program, and other opportunities to contribute and learn.
The event concluded with informal networking, allowing participants to continue discussions and build connections within the Zephyr ecosystem.
Thanks
A big thank you to the SMIGHT GmbH team for hosting the meetup, providing the venue, and taking care of food and beverages. Many thanks as well to STMicroelectronics for sponsoring the board giveaways. We also appreciate all the speakers for sharing their insights and everyone who joined us for this community event.
📸 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 Karlsruhe 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.