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Assisted-By: Nobody — Zephyr Podcast #056

By October 23, 2026October 26th, 2026No Comments

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Episode Summary

  • Feature Freeze: Zephyr 4.5 is at its third release candidate, with the release due within a week. With the hard feature freeze in effect, pull requests are piling up for the next merge window, so this episode is mostly news from around the community.
  • OpenDial: OpenDial is a DIY surface dial and high-resolution scroll wheel built on upstream Zephyr, with an RP2040 board, an AS5600 magnetic angle sensor, and its bill of materials published alongside the code. High-resolution scrolling, which most operating systems support through the HID descriptor, scrolls per pixel rather than per notch. The AS5600 was designed for motor position sensing and draws a fair amount of power, which is fine for a wired device; for a battery-powered one, an optical encoder such as the PixArt PAT9125, which already has an upstream driver, is a better fit.
  • FOSDEM 2027: FOSDEM 2027, on 30 and 31 January in Brussels, will have an Embedded & Resource-Constrained OS devroom, organized together with other open source RTOS communities such as RIOT and Ariel OS. FOSDEM now favors themed devrooms over single-project ones. The call for participation goes out in the coming days, and talks are recorded for those who can’t get into the room.
  • Assisted-by: Following the Maintainers Summit in Prague, Linux kernel developers plan to drop the requirement to add an Assisted-by tag to AI-assisted patches, since it can’t be enforced and not everyone adds it. Zephyr adopted the same rule, and the community is now discussing on Discord whether to keep it. The tag can tell reviewers which kinds of mistakes to look for, but some see it as free advertising for AI vendors. Share your thoughts on Discord.
  • A Tested Tag: At the Zephyr Maintainers Forum, maintainers discussed asking contributors to state how they tested their changes, either with a tag in the commit message, checked automatically like Signed-off-by, or with a pull request template.
  • Clang Thread Safety Analysis: A pull request from Brian Cain at Qualcomm adds Clang Thread Safety Analysis to Zephyr. With CONFIG_THREAD_SAFETY_ANALYSIS and an LLVM toolchain, annotations such as Z_GUARDED_BY, Z_ACQUIRES and Z_RELEASES on locks, and on the functions that take and release them, let Clang catch locking mistakes at compile time. The macros compile to nothing on other compilers, the kernel’s spinlocks and internals are annotated, and applications can use the same annotations. It could land once the merge window reopens.
  • basic_radio: Following TI’s proprietary radio talk at ZDS, a first draft of the basic_radio API is out: a vendor-neutral driver API for packet radios, below any protocol stack, covering configuration, TX, RX and a continuous-wave test mode, with a first implementation for TI’s CC23x0 and RX and TX samples.
  • I2C Target Registers: The I2C target register set library handles low-level target transactions, so a target device can be implemented as a set of registers. Fabio’s per-register read and write callbacks make it easy to implement fixed registers, clear-on-read interrupt status registers, or write-1-to-clear bits, and move the callbacks to ROM. The change is approved and should be merged once the merge window reopens.
  • A Test Bench for Dev Kits: Benjamin has been working on a test bench for the many dev kits in his home office: a rack where boards stay plugged in and are always available to Twister. A Zephyr-based controller, an ESP32 for now, exposes the USB devices plugged into it over Wi-Fi using USB/IP, so the host running Twister sees them as if they were plugged in locally, even behind several hubs. Planned features include power cycling, leasing boards, a webcam view of the bench, and helpers to generate Twister hardware maps. Twister can already pick boards from a pool using a hardware map, though it has its limits at scale.
  • Virtual Wires: Another idea for the test bench: route pins such as UART or I2C between boards in software with analog crosspoint switches like the WCH CH446, an 8×16 matrix, with a logic analyzer on the virtual wires. The Jumperless V5 is a breadboard built around the CH446, with an LED under every hole, programmable supplies, and a built-in scope and logic analyzer; its creator, Kevin Santo Cappuccio, was on Embedded.fm 532.
  • Ollama: Fabio has been running open models locally with Ollama. Building it from source on Debian only took a few dev packages, and it also runs in a virtual machine, with Vulkan passed through to the host GPU using Venus. You need a GPU with enough memory, but it’s an easy way to see what local models can do.
  • Zsign: Zsign is a desktop app that keeps MCUboot signing keys in an encrypted vault, protected by the operating system’s credential store (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Locker or Linux Secret Service) or a passphrase, and signs images with imgtool from a GUI or a local API. It’s free for non-commercial use.
  • Meetups: The Zephyr meetup in Dublin is on Thursday, 29 October, at the Analog Devices office.