On September 24, the Zephyr community will gather in Stuttgart for a hands-on workshop followed by an afternoon meetup featuring community-led technical presentations.
The event is open to experienced contributors, first-time users, students, engineers, and anyone interested in open source embedded development. Attendees may join both sessions or choose either the workshop or the meetup based on their interests.
The morning workshop is designed for developers who are getting started with Zephyr or would like to deepen their practical knowledge. During the afternoon meetup, attendees can connect with the community and learn about Zephyr-based products, subsystems, features, and real-world use cases.
About the Host Team:
Bosch Power Tools is hosting the workshop and meetup in Stuttgart and welcoming the Zephyr community for a full day of learning, technical exchange, and networking. Bosch Power Tools, a division of the Bosch Group, is a leading global supplier of power tools, garden tools, accessories, and measuring technology. Through brands such as Bosch and Dremel, the company develops user-focused solutions for professionals and DIY enthusiasts, with an emphasis on innovation, quality, reliability, performance, and safety.
Event Details:
- Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026
- Workshop: 9:00 am–1:00 pm
- Meetup: 2:00 pm–5:30 pm
- Robert Bosch Power Tools GmbH
- Address: Max-Lang-Straße 40–46, 70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany
- Google Map
You are welcome to attend both the workshop and the meetup or register for the session that best matches your interests.
Workshop: 9:00 am–1:00 pm
The hands-on workshop is intended for developers who are new to Zephyr as well as those who would like to strengthen their practical knowledge. The session will include guided exercises and may cover command-line workflows, modular application development, testing with Twister, and native simulation.
Seats are limited, so early registration is recommended. Additional information about the workshop format and requirements will be shared with registered attendees.
Meetup: 2:00 pm–5:30 pm
The afternoon meetup will bring the community together for presentations, technical discussions, and networking. Speakers will share knowledge about products running Zephyr, project subsystems, useful features, development experiences, and real-world embedded applications.
Whether you are an experienced Zephyr developer or are just beginning to explore dependable, low-power embedded systems, you are welcome to join, learn, and connect with the community.
Agenda:
2:00 – 2:10 PM – Welcome and opening remarks – Bosch & Zephyr team
2:10 – 2:25 PM – A common Zephyr Project Setup and Developer Tooling – Thorsten Klein, Senior Software Developer, Bosch Hausgeräte GmbH (BSH)
This talk presents our approach to a common Zephyr Project setup, including repository structures, mirroring of source code and binary blobs, and a short introduction in our developer tooling supporting our daily workflows. We share the practical decisions, challenges, and lessons learned from building and maintaining this setup at scale.
2:30 – 3:00 PM – Beyond Basic Shields: Unlocking Complex Hardware Setups in Zephyr – Tobias Kästner, Solution Architect Medical IoT, inovex GmbH
Zephyr’s hardware abstraction model offers immense practical support for Agile Systems Engineering, facilitating the decoupling of system functionality across modular PCBAs via what Zephyr calls Boards and Shields. This one-to-one mapping between real hardware and what the software needs to function allows rapid iteration cycles across full embedded systems. However, the current shield implementation strictly limits what can be expressed in Devicetree overlay configurations today.
Inherent bottlenecks—such as rigid single-connector bindings and the inability to instantiate duplicate shields—constrain developers to a narrow subset of hardware board configurations.
This talk examines the status quo in more detail and introduces an open-source utility, available today, designed to remove these constraints. Through concrete hardware examples, the session showcases how to model multi-instance and multi-connector shield setups, concluding with an outline of the roadmap toward upstreaming these improvements into Zephyr.
3:00 – 3:30 PM – Break
3:30 – 3:45 PM – How Zephyr Shaped My Journey as a Trainee in Embedded Software Development – Verena Abt, Embedded Developer, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG
The community spirit of open-source projects is extraordinarily captivating, and it was this very spirit that I experienced firsthand within my trainee program. During this time, I had the invaluable opportunity to immerse myself in various aspects of the Zephyr Project across different job stations.
In this session, I’ll share my journey of becoming part of the Zephyr Project community, highlighting:
- Navigating the Learning Curve: Insights from porting existing applications to Zephyr.
- Establishing a Repository Structure: Challenges and solutions in organizing code effectively.
- Exploring the Toolchain: Meeting the needs of embedded software development.
- Contributing My First Pull Request: The thrill and lessons from my first pull request.
By the end of this session, you’ll walk away with practical tips to kickstart your own journey with Zephyr and feel inspired by the empowering experience of being part of the Zephyr Project community!
3:50 – 4:05 PM – Building a FIDO2 Authenticator with Zephyr – Jan Schmale, Software Engineer, TeraTron GmbH
FIDO2 security keys enable phishing-resistant authentication and are commonly associated with dedicated commercial hardware. Zephyr now includes a FIDO2 authenticator implementation, allowing embedded devices to integrate standard WebAuthn and passkey authentication.
This talk introduces the new FIDO2 support in Zephyr and provides a practical overview of what it enables, how it is integrated into an application, and its current state. It covers the existing USB HID support as well as the Bluetooth LE support currently under upstream review, based on experience bringing it up on Nordic hardware and testing it with Windows.
A short live demonstration will show a Zephyr-based device registering and using a passkey as a Bluetooth LE FIDO2 authenticator without custom host software.
Attendees will leave with an understanding of where the new subsystem can be used, how to get started, and which areas are still evolving.
4:10 – 4:25 PM – Following Zephyr Safety: Joining the WG and Contributing Requirements – Harunobu Kurokawa, Senior Manager, Renesas
Harunobu will discuss his experience contributing to the Zephyr Safety Working Group and introduce the Route 3 approach, which reconstructs safety requirements from existing mature code and tests. He will also explore the need for reviewers with both software and functional safety expertise and explain how AI assistants may support, rather than replace, expert review.
4:30 – 5:00 PM – Zephyr? – Lets’ try! – Heinz Haeberle, IoT System Architect, Robert Bosch Power Tools GmbH
The story on how we built a Zephyr based Laser Range Finder prototype on top of a single Chip CPU including BLE. Moving from different hardware approaches, software porting issues and meanwhile trying to learn Zephyr. It’s not a Zephyr tutorial though, it is a report on what we did and a motivation for doing prototypes.
5:00–5:30 PM – Quiz, Dev board distribution, Closing remarks and networking
Register to Attend:
Registration is required so the host team can plan the event space and logistics. Seats are limited. Register here.
Thank You to Our Supporters:
Thank you to Bosch Power Tools for hosting the workshop and meetup and providing a space for the Zephyr community to learn, exchange ideas, and connect.
A special thank you to Nordic Semiconductor & NXP Semiconductors for sponsoring development boards that will be offered as giveaways, supporting hands-on learning and continued exploration of Zephyr after the event.
Thank you to Qt for sponsoring the food and beverages for the workshop and meetup.
We also appreciate the speakers, volunteers, and attendees whose participation makes this event possible.
About the Zephyr Community Meetups:
This event is part of the Zephyr Community Meetup Series, a collection of local gatherings hosted by community members with support from the Zephyr Project.
These events provide a welcoming space for developers, students, researchers, and embedded systems enthusiasts to exchange technical knowledge, present real-world projects, discuss challenges, and build stronger local open source communities.
Whether you are based in Stuttgart or another part of the world, we encourage community members, companies, universities, and developer groups 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.
We look forward to seeing everyone in Stuttgart!