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Connecting Engineers to Zephyr at Embedded World

By August 1, 2022No Comments
Zephyr booth at 2022 Embedded World

Written by Mike Szczys, Zephyr Project Ambassador and Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth

The Zephyr Project hosted a booth at the 2022 Embedded World conference in Nuremberg at the end of June. Just two weeks after the highly successful Zephyr Developer’s Summit (ZDS) in Mountain View, Embedded World was an excellent opportunity to get people excited for Zephyr.

Embedded World was packed with engineers working on a huge range of really interesting problems. It was their chance to get exposed to new and interesting solutions, which made the Zephyr booth a popular place to stop for a conversation.

Several Zephyr Project member organizations were on-site, representing Zephyr and showing how their company uses the ecosystem.

The Exhibitors

I work as a Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth and was excited to be showing off our hardware demos at the Zephyr booth. We’re a device management cloud that makes it easy for firmware engineers to build and manage IoT devices. We use Zephyr to cover a vast range of hardware options. Golioth brought a number of cloud-connected hardware examples to Embedded World using Thread network, Cellular, Ethernet, and WiFi connections along with us to the conference.

Nordic Semiconductor was on hand with a great demo of the Nordic nRF5340 Audio DK. Blinking lights are common at embedded hardware cons, but how many times do you get to check out the audio fidelity of the chips you’re working with? Nordic’s total embrace of Zephyr was a big draw to the booth this year. People working with Nordic chips know that Zephyr is the future and are looking to learn as much as they can about the RTOS.

The Memfault team was doing live demos of how their observability tools work with Zephyr projects to provide remote monitoring. This included a guided tour of how engineers can craft their code to receive data and telemetry from their devices in the field.

Laird showed their range of the Laird Sentrius Bluetooth 5 long-range sensors. The sensor are running Zephyr and deliver low-power battery-operated nodes hardened against the elements. Incidentally, the Golioth Thread demo was built using the BT510, one of the sensor being exhibited by the Laird team.

AVSystems launched a new AVSystems Anjay 3.0 LwM2M SDK at Embedded World. It targets a lighter footprint for building systems that conserve both battery power and bandwidth. The SDK includes a built-in integration with Zephyr.

These good vibes will be back in March

We heard a lot of positive things throughout the week. People are curious about Zephyr. Many value the stewardship from the Linux Foundation as a core virtue compared to other RTOSes that have been pulled into the orbit of corporations not traditionally known for nurturing open source projects. And of course the supply chain shortages that have become a day-to-day headache are on everyone’s mind so there was a lot of discussion on how Zephyr can help.

This one should be on your conference bucket list, and luckily you won’t have to wait very long. Embedded World is traditionally held in March but was delayed this year due to coronavirus concerns. It will be back on track for 2023 and March is coming up fast. The Zephyr Project will be there, and we hope you will too!

If you have questions or would like to chat with any of the Zephyr ambassadors or members of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), please join us on Discord to start a conversation.

Mike Szczys

Mike is a Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth. His deep love of microcontrollers began in the early 2000s, growing from the desire to make more of the BEAM robotics he was building. During his 12 years at Hackaday (eight of them as Editor in Chief), he had a front-row seat for the growth of the industry, and was active in developing a number of custom electronic conference badges. When he's not reading data sheets he's busy as an orchestra musician in Madison, Wisconsin.