Zephyr Project

Zephyr Tech Talk #008 - IPC in Zephyr: to Zbus, or not to Zbus?
2024-01-10 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris)
Tune in on Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024 (9:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM CET) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream!
As we enter the new year, we are having not one, but two guests on the show! There are many ways to implement inter-process communication (IPC) in Zephyr, and choosing the right one for your use case can be tricky. Are low-level kernel primitives to be preferred for their performance and footprint, or should you be using a higher-level abstraction like Zbus?
Rodrigo Peixoto and Bjarki Arge Andreasen will join Benjamin to debate the pros and cons of each approach. Rodrigo is the author of Zbus and will give us insight into the design decisions behind it and some of the use cases to which it best suits. Bjarki will advocate for some of the lower-level IPC mechanisms available in Zephyr and how it can sometimes be beneficial to use them to leverage the compiler and linker’s ability to check for type consistency, even if that might mean being less generic.
As always, it will be a lively discussion with you, the audience, and the hope is that we will answer the question posed in the Tech Talk’s title with more than the traditional: “it depends!”.
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

Zephyr Tech Talk #009 - Practical Tips to Build Secure & Observable Embedded Systems
2024-01-17 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris)
Tune in on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024 (9:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM CET) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream, where Benjamin will be joined by Katarzyna Zalewska, Software Engineer at Sternum.
Zephyr is being used in a wide variety of applications where it is critical to be able to remotely observe and monitor the behavior of the device, in particular to detect and respond to security threats. In this talk, we will discuss some of the typical threats that IoT devices are facing, the current state of security in Zephyr, and how commercial security offerings such as Sternum’s can be used to enhance the security of Zephyr-based devices at runtime.
As always, we are planning on having lots of live demos, and leaving plenty of time for you to ask your questions live in our chat.
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

Zephyr Meetup Germany: Cologne
2024-01-18 18:00 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Join the Zephyr community for our second Meetup in Germany on January 18, 2024 at 6-9:30 pm! Hosted at the grandcentrix office in Cologne, located at Holzmarkt 1, this gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone!
Visit the main meetup website to register for the event here.

Building Open Keyboards with ZMK & Zephyr // Zephyr Tech Talk #010
2024-01-24 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Tune in on Wednesday, January 24 (9:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM CET) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream where Benjamin Cabé will be joined by Peter Johanson, creator and project lead of the ZMK project.
Mechanical keyboards have become increasingly popular, and keyboard enthusiasts all over the world are leveraging open source to build the perfect keyboard that does exactly what they want.
ZMK is an open-source firmware for custom keyboards that is built on Zephyr RTOS. From USB and Bluetooth connectivity, to power management, to the handling of input keys (of course!), there is a lot that goes into controlling a keyboard. We’ll discuss the challenges of building a keyboard firmware, and dive into some of the Zephyr features that help address them.
Whether you’re a keyboard enthusiast, a Zephyr enthusiast, or neither and just interested in learning something new, we hope you’ll join us!
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

RISC-V Munich Meetup
2024-01-25 18:30 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Get ready for the next in-person RISC-V meetup, which takes place in Munich on Thursday, January 25 at 6:30 – 8:30 pm CET. This meetup brings together RISC-V enthusiasts from Munich, Bavaria and more. Register here.
Zephyr will be included via presentation by Michael Gielda, Vice President Business Development at Antmicro and Chair of the Zephyr Project Marketing Committee. Michael will give a talk about, “Zephyr and Renode, pushing RISC-V to the next level of reliability and testability.”
This event is managed by members of the RISC-V community. To learn more or to register, visit the main meetup page.

FOSDEM (Brussels, Belgium)
2024-02-03 - 2024-02-04
FOSDEM, which takes place on February 3-4 in Brussels, is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. This event is expecting 636 speakers, 591 events, and 65 tracks.
Zephyr will be featured in several presentations. For more information or to register for the event, visit the FOSDEM website.
Saturday, February 3:
11 – 11:25 am: Introducing Sound Open Firmware project – Daniel Baluta
Sound Open Firmware is an open source audio DSP firmware and SDK that provides audio firmware infrastructure and development tools for developers who are interested in audio or signal processing on modern DSPs.
Sound Open Firmware is supported on platforms from Intel, NXP, Mediatek and AMD. It comes with Linux kernel ALSA driver and open source firmware. Past year saw a major effort on integrating Sound Open Firmware with Zephyr RTOS.
The goal of the presentation is to offer a gentle introduction to the project, building blocks, community and tools.
Project page: https://www.sofproject.org/ Project documentation page: https://thesofproject.github.io/latest/index.html
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm: Zephyr Project Hour at the cafe in building F
Are you interested in learning more about Zephyr? Come meet the developers, engage in conversations, and enjoy a casual and friendly environment. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, seize this perfect opportunity to network, ask questions, and gain insights into the Zephyr project.
We look forward to seeing you there!
2:30 pm – 2:55 pm: Power to the People – Technology for Access to Energy – Vivien Barnier & Martin Jäger
The world has made great progress in providing everyone with access to energy; however, recently, the number of unelectrified people on Earth has increased. Providing access to energy is a critical and complex challenge as most unelectrified people live in extremely remote and hard-to-reach areas, often having limited mobile network connectivity, unknown (future) demand patterns, and extreme weather conditions combined with very low purchasing power of the affected population. The power of Open Source is still completely underrepresented in technological innovations in this sector. We are working towards improving this situation and will showcase one of our flagship examples: An Open Source Battery Management System (BMS) specifically developed for off-grid energy application. Energy storage and its related technologies are key to any off-grid energy application and the Libre Solar BMS has been specially developed for this use case. We will deep dive into the design decisions and features, covering hardware, firmware and an app. The BMS was developed leveraging solely open source tools: The PCB is designed in KiCad, the firmware runs on Zephyr RTOS and the communication interfaces use the ThingSet protocol over various lower layers like Serial, CAN, WebSocket or MQTT. The hardware went through three design iterations and has been lab and field-tested by several organizations. We will conclude and show why this kind of Open Source technology is of such great importance to bring power to the people in both the sense of bringing electricity literally and also creating the grounds for local value creation in the affected geographies. We invite the whole Energy Open Source community to contribute with their efforts to where the contributions can be most impactful on various levels. The Open Source BMS is one great piece, but we need much more of those.
2:30 pm – 2:55 pm: How open source projects approach Functional Safety – Nicole Pappler & Philipp Ahmann
Open Source is a winning solution for many industries already – and now even safety critical applications want to make use of it. While “security” is a capability of open source since many years, a few years ago using open source in safety critical applications seemed to be impossible even to think about. Nowadays it has become a valid option for upcoming applications. This kind of application that should save lives, or at least not harm anyone. However, with advancements in technology and safety integrity standards, open source is becoming a valid option for upcoming safety critical applications. This talk will provide an overview of how open source projects approach their integration to safety critical applications. Depending on the expectations of these applications, there are different solutions to address their needs. The talk will introduce example projects such as ELISA, the Zephyr Project, and the Xen Project, which are currently addressing these expectations with various mechanisms and approaches.
4 – 4:25 pm: Zephyr and RISC-V: I Ain’t Afraid Of No Ghosts – Mohammed Billoo
RISC-V’s instruction set architecture (ISA) has enabled seasoned embedded software engineers to experiment with FPGAs since numerous open-source RISC-V cores can be flashed onto an FPGA. The Zephyr Project is rapidly emerging as a leading real-time operating system (RTOS). Zephyr integrates open-source and security best practices to ensure a vendor-neutral, secure, and reliable platform.
In this talk, Mohammed Billoo will describe the process of getting to Zephyr to run on the UPduino (https://tinyvision.ai/pages/the-upduino), flashed with the neorv32 RISC-V processor (https://github.com/stnolting/neorv32). He will walk through building and flashing the neorv32 RISC-V core on the FPGA, creating a Zephyr application that can output Hello World to the UART, and loading the application to the FPGA. Mohammed will also walk through the necessary Zephyr drivers to get the application running. This talk will demonstrate how combining RISC-V and Zephyr on an FPGA opens up new opportunities for embedded software applications. Using open-source software and firmware on a low-cost FPGA reduces the bar for entry for enthusiasts and hobbyists. The audience will learn the following in this talk:

Relevance of the RISC-V instruction set architecture for hobbyists
Overview and structure of the neorv32 RISC-V processor
Overview and structure of The Zephyr Project RTOS
RISC-V support in Zephyr
Relevant Zephyr drivers
Demo: From Empty Silicon To Zephyr Boot

5-5:25 pm: From an artificial nose weekend hack to a future-proof IoT device – Benjamin Cabe
It was a long weekend in May 2020. Like many of my human siblings stuck at home with time on their hands due to an ongoing pandemic, I was busy trying to perfect my bread recipe. Fast forward to a few hours later, I had assembled an Arduino-based “artificial nose” that used a gas sensor and AI (so-called TinyML) to learn and detect scents (hence potentially the smell of a perfectly fermented sourdough starter). As I open-sourced and started to share the project on social media, it went viral… and I felt like an impostor, as most of the code powering it was, frankly, hackish. Or maybe it wasn’t, as it had the merit of having helped me invent something new, in literally a few hours.
In this talk I will walk you through some of the key features of the artificial nose, and how I eventually rewrote my original code to leverage Zephyr (an open-source real-time operating system) in order to make it easier for myself and the community to extend the project, and run it on a variety of hardware targets.
You will learn, among other things: * How to move from a complex “super loop” to well architected threads and event-based programming ; * How to run TinyML models (ex. TensorFlow Lite) while not compromising the rest of your embedded system ; * How to build an efficient and easy-to-maintain graphical user interface ; * How to leverage Zephyr hardware-abstraction layer.
All the code and demonstrations shown in the talk is open source and available on GitHub, and you are very much encouraged to go ahead and build your own artificial nose after the presentation!
Sunday, February 4:
12:30 – 1 pm: Application of the SPDX Safety Profile in the Safety Scope of the Zephyr Project – Nicole Pappler, Stanislav Pankevich
Creating and maintaining a safety critical project comes with a lot of challenges. One central issue is keeping your documentation, starting from planning and guideline documents, down to requirements, safety analysis, reviews and tests, consistent and up to date. These project artefacts often have their own lifecycle and are natively managed in different tools, with usually great traceability capabilities regarding dependencies between these artefacts as long as you stay within one tool or within a (usually propriety) tool family of one single tool vendor. Currently the resulting traceability gaps between these tools are handled either by the popular engineering tools like MS Excel or methods like “search for identical names”, depending highly on manual maintenance. Using SPDX relationships, the upcoming Safety Profile in SPDX 3.1 will provide a model to represent all these dependencies as a knowledge model that can be used both to analyse possible impacts after a change (be it because of a security update or functional variants of your product), provide evidence of completeness and compliance as a Safety SBOM or simply keep track of your product variants. In this talk we will provide both an introduction to the SPDX Safety Profile as well as a real life example using StrictDoc and the Zephyr Project’s Functional Safety scope.
Check out the complete schedule and dev rooms like SBOM, Embedded, Automotive and more. https://fosdem.org/2024/

ROS 2 on Microcontrollers with micro-ROS & Zephyr 🦾 // Zephyr Tech Talk
2024-02-07 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Tune in on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024 (9:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM CET) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream, where Benjamin Cabé will be joined by Dave Rensberger from Beechwoods Software Inc, to talk about all things robotics and Zephyr.
ROS 2 is a very popular open source robotics framework which allows to build and orchestrate very complex robotics systems. In this Tech Talk, we’ll dive into micro-ROS, a microcontroller-optimized client API for ROS2 which allows to bake even more intelligence into the low-power sensors that may be part of a robotics application.
Dave and his team recently looked into using micro-ROS on Zephyr and since they got to play with quite a few neat Zephyr features, they thought they would share 😉 We’ll look at the Raspberry Pi PicoW specifically, from how to use PIO/SPI to interface with sensors, to a preview of upcoming Wi-Fi support, to integration as part of a complete ROS 2 setup, with a Linux-based agent in charge of the higher-level procesing.
As usual, the session will be heavily demo-focused, with plenty of time for you to ask questions directly through our live chat!
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

Implementing a Shell over BLE in Zephyr // Zephyr Tech Talk #012
2024-02-21 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Tune in on Wednesday, February 21 (9:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM CET) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream where Benjamin Cabé will be joined by Luis Ubieda to discuss his journey into adding support for a BLE Shell in Zephyr.
Adding a shell to an Embedded device can be incredibly helpful for troubleshooting and debugging. The Zephyr shell already supports a variety of backends including UART, of course, but also Telnet or MQTT.
Luis has been working on adding support for BLE as an additional transport layer, and will tell us about his journey and why the BLE Shell might be your next best friend if you tend to (re-)write custom command-based protocols and CLI-like interfaces for your Bluetooth projects.
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

Zephyr Meetup India: Bangalore
2024-02-23 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Join the Zephyr Project for a Meetup in Bangalore, India, on Friday, February 23 at 5-8 pm at the Bosch Koramangala Campus.
This gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone!
Seats are limited – register here today!

Live community Q&A - Zephyr 3.6 Release // Zephyr Tech Talk #013
2024-02-28 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Tune in on Wednesday, Feb. 28 (9:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM CET) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream!
In this special episode, we will walk through some of the highlights of the Zephyr 3.6 release (scheduled for February 23, 2024), and we will discuss some of the new features and improvements with the release managers and some of the maintainers and contributors that helped get 3.6 out the door.
Bring all the questions you might have to our panel of Zephyr experts: as always, we will make sure this is a highly interactive live session!
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

Zephyr – Hands-on Workshop für deinen Einstieg in das Zephyr RTOS
2024-02-28 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Berlin)
At their first meetup on February 28, 2024, Navimatix GmbH invites participants to dive into the world of embedded development hands-on, with a plethora of practical examples. Attendees will be introduced to Bridle, a project serving as a blueprint for individual product development endeavors, offering design patterns and best practices.
Following a brief introduction, attendees will be guided through a series of tutorials, empowering them to take their first steps with Zephyr and Bridle. This includes programming a microcontroller board, providing firsthand experience of the many valuable features Zephyr brings to embedded development.

Nordic Webinar: Adding Device Firmware Update (DFU/FOTA) Support in nRF Connect SDK
2024-03-13 10:00 - 11:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Having Device Firmware Update (DFU) or Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) support in an IoT product is becoming the norm now; it has become a standard requirement in modern products, and customers expect products to have it for security updates and improvements updates.
In this developer-oriented webinar on March 13 at 10 am PDT (9 AM CET / 4 PM CST ASIA & 6 PM CET / 1 PM EDT), Nordic will dive into the fundamental principles and best practices for adding DFU/FOTA support in an nRF Connect SDK-based firmware. We will focus on MCUboot as the default bootloader in the Zephyr RTOS, inherited by the nRF Connect SDK.
This webinar is managed by Nordic Semiconductor. To learn more about it or to register for the event, click here.
Agenda:
– General bootloader (MCUboot) and DFU concepts
– Fundamental options in MCUboot and options to perform DFU/FOTA in MCUboot
– Multi-Image builds and the Partition Manager
– Hands-on demos for DFU over UART and FOTA over Bluetooth Low Energy
– Detailed hands-on resources for DFU over USB, DFU over external memory, and FOTA over – – Wi-Fi/Cellular IoT
– Q&A
Speakers:

Diving Into Zephyr's New Hardware Model // Zephyr Tech Talk #014
2024-04-03 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Tune in on Wednesday, April 3 (9:00 AM EDT / 3:00 PM CEST) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream where Benjamin and his guests will introduce the new hardware model adopted by The Zephyr Project starting with the 3.7.0 release.
Over the recent years, the world of embedded systems has been evolving at a rapid pace, and the hardware model that Zephyr has been using until recently was no longer able to keep up with the new requirements. SoCs with multiple cores, multi-SoC boards, … are just a few examples of the new features that the old model was not able to handle properly. In this session, where we will be chatting with Carles Cufí, Torsten Rasmussen, and Anas Nashif, you will learn about the new hardware model, the rationale behind it, and, of course, how to migrate any existing board or SoC to the new model (spoiler alert, it’s a mostly seamless process!).
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

Zephyr Meetup Germany: Berlin 2024
2024-04-05 18:00 - 21:30 (Europe/Berlin)
Welcome to our third Zephyr Project Meetup in Germany!
This gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone!
Our primary language for group communication and events is English, and we warmly welcome individuals from all backgrounds.
Seats are limited, and we kindly request you to register soon to secure your spot!.
Register now: https://web.cvent.com/event/ca673181-b9c1-481f-add6-bd0f8e1f0099/summary

Embedded World 2024 (Nuremberg, Germany)
2024-04-09 - 2024-04-11
The embedded world Exhibition&Conference will take place on April 9-11 in Nuremberg, Germany. The event provides a global platform and a place to meet for the entire embedded community, including leading experts, key players and industry associations. It offers unprecedented insight into the world of embedded systems, from components and modules to operating systems, hardware and software design, M2M communication, services, and various issues related to complex system design.
Its expertise and sharp focus on technologies, processes and future-oriented products make it unparalleled in international comparisons – and THE must-attend event for developers, system architects, product managers and technical management.

The Zephyr Project will be on-site again as an exhibitor with a booth (Hall 4-170)that will showcase a wide variety of demos and products running on Zephyr. Members Analog Devices, Antmicro, Nordic Semiconductor and NXP as well as Ac6, AVSystem, Golioth, Infineon, IRNAS, Laird Connectivity, Memfault, Percepio, Renesas, Sternum and Synopsys will have demos and ambassadors on-site to answer questions.
Simultaneously, the embedded world Conference will showcase talks on Zephyr, offering valuable insights.
Tuesday, April 9:
Join the Hands-On Zephyr Project workshop by Jonas Remmert from Phytec Messtechnik GmbH. This interactive workshop will demonstrate how to set up a development environment and configure an out-of-tree example with Zephyr and cover topics like board abstractions, RTOS features and higher layer software subsystems such as the Sensor API, BLE stack and the networking stack.
Jason Murphy (Co-Authors: David Perez, Wassim Magnin) from Analog Devices will also have a session titled, “Revolutionizing Industrial IoT: Enabling Real-time Secure Connectivity to the Edge with Single-Pair Ethernet and Zephyr OS.”
Single-Pair Ethernet (10BASE-T1L SPE) is transforming low speed, insecure fieldbus installations into flexible, higher data rate links with modern cybersecurity. Running over single twisted pair cabling, SPE enables IP connectivity to field-level devices using existing wiring infrastructure, reducing installation costs while eliminating data islands that commonly exist between operational technology (OT) and IT systems. The shift towards extending IP connectivity to the edge is driving the requirement for
integrating Ethernet connectivity into resource-constrained embedded devices around factories and buildings. This paper explores the use of Zephyr OS as an embedded software ecosystem for Ethernet- connected industrial devices. Zephyr provides a comprehensive networking software stack including support for protocols such as TCP/IP, MQTT and TLS that are crucial software components in industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. We present an overview of SPE technology for IIoT applications, followed by a
discussion on how Zephyr’s software ecosystem can be harnessed to drive rapid development of secure, real-time, Ethernet-connected industrial edge devices. The discussion aims to underscore the potential of Single-Pair Ethernet in combination with modern embedded OS, to drive smaller, smarter, and lower-
cost intelligent nodes deeper into the built environment.
Wednesday, April 10:
Explore the talk ‘Zephyr Project: Result of Applying Open Source Project Best Practices’ by Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation. This talk will delve into the open source best practices that Zephyr has applied over the years, and summarize its current status and outline plans for 2024.
Mohammed Billoo , MAB Labs Embedded Solutions, will also give a talk on the same day on ‘Zephyr Device Drivers: Walkthrough and Examples.” In this workshop, he will offer a deep dive into the Zephyr Project RTOS (or “Zephyr”) device driver model presenting examples of the interesting strategy that Zephyr leverages to incorporate different device drivers, including OS-independent open-source drivers.
Oliver Völckers, BeST Berliner Sensortechnik will give a talk on Enhancing Signal Processing Through Transparent AI in an Embedded Sensor System on the same day. Oliver will give a talk on the innovative approach to enhancing machine learning in distributed IoT systems. The focus of the presentation will be on leveraging transparent rules rooted in human knowledge to address the challenge of acquiring extensive training data, particularly when dealing with sensor data from EDGE IoT systems. The system, operational for nearly two years and actively evaluating wastewater pumps for Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed ICE trains, will be explored in detail. Attendees can anticipate valuable insights into the functionality of the system and its implications for designing distributed IoT sensor nodes for accurate data interpretation.
Thursday, April 11:
Tiago Monte, Developer Marketing Manager at Nordic Semiconductor, will give a presentation about “Building the future of IoT with nRF Connect SDK and Zephyr RTOS.” IoT devices have become more than wirelessly connected gadgets as they continuously incorporate more functionality and sophistication, from security features to multiprotocol, machine learning, and more. This puts increased pressure on embedded software developers to balance development cost, time to market, and maintenance of their products in the field.

In this session, we will discuss Nordic’s nRF Connect SDK, based on Zephyr RTOS, and how it was created from the ground up based on a vision for how to enable developers to build the future of IoT faster, securely, and more scalable.

To stay up to date on the demos, products and ambassadors that will be featured at the booth, subscribe to the Zephyr newsletter, join our Discord community or follow us on X, LinkedIn or Mastadon.
To learn more about embedded world or to register, visit the main event page here.

Zephyr Developer Summit/Embedded Open Source Summit 2024 (Seattle, Washington)
2024-04-16 - 2024-04-18
Zephyr Developer Summit will take place on April 16-18, 2024 in Seattle Washington. Launched in 2021, Zephyr Developer Summit is for developers using or considering Zephyr in embedded products. This year we will be focusing on supporting topics of interest to users of Zephyr, developers contributing upstream, and maintainer specific topics.
Check out the full schedule here.
If you’d like to sponsor the event, click here.
Visit the main event website for more updates: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/embedded-open-source-summit/

Meetup: Zephyr - Hands-on workshop in Erlangen / Germany
2024-04-25 18:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
In the 2nd Zephyr project Technology Meetup, organised by Navimatix and MethodPark, in Erlangen on 25.04.2024 you will be shown the advantages of Zephyr – hands-on and with many practical examples. After a short introduction, you will be guided through a series of tutorials in which you can take your first steps with Zephyr and Bridle. More specifically, you will program a small microcontroller board to get your own idea of the many useful features Zephyr has to offer for embedded development.
Target group:

Experienced embedded developers
Newcomers
Software and system architects
Anyone who is curious about exciting software technologies

The workshop will be held in German
Registration via: Meet Zephyr – Hands-on Workshop für deinen Einstieg in das Zephyr RTOS , Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 6:00 PM | Meetup

Trusted Computing Center of Excellence Summit 2024 (Annapolis, Maryland)
2024-05-09 - 2024-05-10
Trusted Computing Center of Excellence is hosting the TCCoE Summit on May 9-10 held in conjunction with High Confidence Software and Systems Conference on May 6-8 in Annapolis, Maryland.
Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation, will be on-site for two sessions.
On Thursday, May 9, Kate will present “Building Dependable Embedded Systems with Open Source Components,” at 3-3:30 pm. She’ll also return for a panel discussion at 4-5 pm about “Technology Advances and Modern Software Development.” Other panelists include Dr. Sergey Bratus from Dartmouth Univeristy, Dr. Trent Jaeger from UC Riverside, Dr. Ryan Craven from ONR and moderated by Ray Richards.
Check out the complete schedule:

Learn more about this conference here.

Zephyr Meetup Germany: Cologne
2024-05-14 18:00 - 22:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | IMG_1151 (1) (1)
Join the Zephyr community meetup on May 14, 2024 at 6-10:00 pm! Hosted at the grandcentrix office in Cologne, located at Holzmarkt 1, this gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone!
Check here to learn more about the event, agenda and registration.

Zephyr Meetup Germany: Karlsruhe
2024-05-23 18:00 - 22:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | ppk-status-enabled.png
Join the Zephyr community meetup on May 23, 2024 at 6-10:00 pm! Hosted at the inovex GmbH in Karlsruhe, located at Ludwig-Erhard-Allee 6, this gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone!
Check here to learn more about agenda & registration

Tracing & Profiling Your Zephyr RTOS Applications // Zephyr Tech Talk #016
2024-05-30 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris)
Tune in on Thursday, May 30 (9:00 AM EDT / 3:00 PM CEST) for a new Zephyr Tech Talk live stream where Benjamin Cabé will be joined by Johan Kraft from Percepio® and Anas Nashif from Intel Corporation to dive into the topic of tracing and profiling in Zephyr RTOS.
The execution flow of a real-time system can be complex to understand, and classic debugging tools only provide a limited view of the system’s behavior. Tracing and profiling tools, on the other hand, are incredibly useful for investigating potential bottlenecks and performance issues, and are essential for understanding the behavior of the operating system and running applications. In this Tech Talk, we will do a live tour of the tracing and profiling capabilities in Zephyr RTOS, and will show you how to leverage open source and commercial tools such as Eclipse Trace Compass, Tracealyzer, and others, to make sense of the data collected.
Zephyr Tech Talks are live streams organized by and for the Zephyr community. Join us live to get a chance to ask your questions directly to our guests, or simply catch up the recording anytime afterwards!

36TH ANNUAL FIRST CONFERENCE (Fukuoka, Japan)
2024-06-09 - 2024-06-14
FIRST is an international confederation of trusted computer incident response teams who cooperatively handle computer security incidents and promote incident prevention programs. FIRST is a front-line enabler in the global response community, providing access to the best practices, tools, and trusted communication.
Established in 1990, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, Inc. (FIRST) is an international non-profit association of Computer Security and Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs), Product Security and Incident Response Teams (PSIRTs), and independent security researchers from the public, private, and academic sectors.
FIRST aims to foster cooperation and coordination in incident prevention, to stimulate rapid reaction to incidents, and to promote information sharing between members and the community at large. Membership comprises of over 600 teams with representation from over 100 nations.
The conference provides a forum for sharing goals, ideas, and information on how to improve computer security on a global scale. This yearʼs annual conference will be held June 9-14, 2024 Fukuoka, Japan with a virtual option.
Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems, will be on-site with presentation focused on security. Stay tuned for more details…

Zephyr Meetup - Learn about an advanced operating system for smart devices
2024-06-11 18:00 - 22:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Join the Zephyr Project Community for the first Slovenian Zephyr Meetup in Maribor, organised by IRNAS featuring practical presentations on the open source Zephyr RTOS for IoT and embedded systems. Learn from experts about the latest innovations, including Zephyr’s applications in smart devices, automotive systems, and industrial machinery. The event will be held on June 11, 2024, at KID Kibla, Maribor, and includes short presentations, Q&A sessions, and networking opportunities. Check the agenda here.

Zephyr Project Meetup: Paris, France
2024-06-20 18:00 - 22:00 (Europe/Paris)
Join the Zephyr community meetup on June 20, 2024 at 6-10:00 pm! Hosted at the Ac6 office in Paris, France this gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone!
Check here to learn more about agenda & registration

Zephyr Project Meetup: Austin, Texas
2024-07-10 18:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Jester King Brewery, 13187 Fitzhugh Rd, Austin, TX, 78736, United States
Welcome to the Zephyr Project in-person meetup in Austin, Texas. This gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development.
There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features you might not have heard of yet. Expand your network and delve deep into the realm of dependable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you’re an experienced expert or just stepping into these fascinating areas, this meetup provides the perfect platform for everyone! Our primary language for group communication and events is English, and we warmly welcome individuals from all backgrounds. Seats are limited, and we kindly request you to register soon to secure your spot.
Note: This meetup is part of the Zephyr Community Meetup Series, gatherings hosted by community members, with support from the Zephyr Project.
To learn more and register, check out this link now.

Embedded Israel #16 - The first Zephyr Project meetup
2024-07-30 17:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Embedded Israel is organizing the inaugural Zephyr Project meetup on July 30, 2024.
Join the Zephyr community for an agenda featuring esteemed speakers Ron Munitz (Chief of Everything at The PSCG) and Vadim Malenboim (Sr. Staff Field Application Engineer at SiFive).
The event will commence with a brief gathering and welcome notes introducing Embedded Israel and meetup host.
Ron Munitz will provide a practical introduction to the Zephyr Project, covering foundational concepts, rapid application development, flashing, and debugging across various platforms including simulators, emulators, HiFive1, and Nordic’s nRF52840.
Vadim Malenboim will delve into technical problem-solving, focusing on device trees and their modification to enable debugging and functionality testing of the hifive1_revb board within Zephyr environments.
Following this session, Lian Granot (Co-Founder & CTO at Sternum) will lead ‘Observability 101,’ a hands-on workshop exploring data collection techniques and bug investigation methodologies for Zephyr Devices.
Participants will gain practical insights and access to Sternum’s IoT observability platform for real-time analytics.
The meetup will conclude with closing remarks and an engaging prize-winning game facilitated by The PSCG and the Nordic Semiconductor.
Don’t miss this opportunity to deepen your understanding of Zephyr’s capabilities and network with industry experts.
Register for the meetup here.

Opportunity Open Source
2024-08-24 08:00 - 2024-08-26 17:00 UTC | IIT Kanpur, G66M+W5J, Kalyanpur,Uttar Pradesh, 208016, India
Join us for Opportunity Open Source 2024, organized by Canonical! Explore the world of open source software with talks, workshops, and hackathons at IIT Kanpur, India, from August 24-26, 2024.
Discover insights into Zephyr, the Real-Time Operating System for IoT, ideal for low-resource hardware like microcontrollers. Learn how Zephyr is shaping the future of embedded systems and IoT applications.
Whether you’re a developer, designer, writer, or enthusiast, there’s something for everyone. Enhance your skills, contribute to impactful projects, and boost your career in open source.
Don’t miss out – submit your ideas for talks, workshops, demos, and more!
Call for abstracts is open – submit soon!

Zephyr® OS on MCUs: Linux for Micros? | Maidenhead
2024-09-10 08:30 - 15:30 UTC
While Linux has long been predominant in microprocessor (MPUs) based embedded systems, the availability of operating systems for microcontrollers (MCUs) is quite fragmented. Microcontroller manufacturers sometimes have their proprietary offerings, and FreeRTOS has existed for many years. However, not much provides a feature set that is even close to Linux.
Meanwhile, Zephyr® OS has become an option. Semiconductor companies are spending a lot of money and effort to have some of their current microcontroller generations supported by Zephyr. Together with NXP Semiconductors, we would like to invite you to a full-day seminar to discuss Zephyr, what it can do, and how it looks and feels on NXPs’ most recent microcontroller family, MCX through hands-on LABs.
The seminar will cover “traditional MCU development,” which is done by small software teams, usually with the software stack of the MCU supplier. New technologies and the growing complexity of the system context push this model to its limits.

Agenda:

08:30 – Registration / Coffee
09:00 – Welcome and Introduction to NXP MCU Portfolio
09:45 – Zephyr® OS

Introduction
Why Zephyr®?
Coffee break
Zephyr® Ecosystem (Support for ARM Cores, RISC-V, etc.)
LVGL GUI Demo RT1060
Ardunio SIMCom Demo

12:00 – Lunch Break
13:00 – Zephyr® Hands-on LABS using NXP FRDM-MCXN947

Hello World: Import Sample, Build, Debug
Kconfig: Explore and Modify Kconfigs, Guiconfig Tool
Debugging with VS Code: Thread Awareness, Stack Usage, Thread Call Stack
Devicetree: MCUXpresso Device Tree Viewer, Board Overlay Files, Modifying Hardware Configuration

15:00 – Wrap Up / Q&A

New MCU projects must keep up with the increased hardware, software, and protocol complexity. Connecting the system to the Internet introduces another order of magnitude in complexity, as plans for security updates must be considered from the start.
Mustering these challenges in the confines of a software stack originally written by hardware vendors to get users started becomes almost impossible. A larger developer base can share the maintenance load of the “common infrastructure,” freeing developers to concentrate on the features which differentiate their products against the competition. The Free and Open-Source approach is a perfect match for this new landscape.
The cross-architecture, vendor-neutral, and permissively licensed Zephyr® OS is introduced to show how it can help development teams concentrate on product features instead of invisible (yet important!) infrastructure.
Register here.

Zephyr® OS on MCUs: Linux for Micros? | Bolton
2024-09-12 08:30 - 15:30 UTC
While Linux has long been predominant in microprocessor (MPUs) based embedded systems, the availability of operating systems for microcontrollers (MCUs) is quite fragmented. Microcontroller manufacturers sometimes have their proprietary offerings, and FreeRTOS has existed for many years. However, not much provides a feature set that is even close to Linux.
Meanwhile, Zephyr® OS has become an option. Semiconductor companies are spending a lot of money and effort to have some of their current microcontroller generations supported by Zephyr. Together with NXP Semiconductors, we would like to invite you to a full-day seminar to discuss Zephyr, what it can do, and how it looks and feels on NXPs’ most recent microcontroller family, MCX through hands-on LABs.
The seminar will cover “traditional MCU development,” which is done by small software teams, usually with the software stack of the MCU supplier. New technologies and the growing complexity of the system context push this model to its limits.

Agenda:

08:30 – Registration / Coffee
09:00 – Welcome and Introduction to NXP MCU Portfolio
09:45 – Zephyr® OS

Introduction
Why Zephyr®?
Coffee break
Zephyr® Ecosystem (Support for ARM Cores, RISC-V, etc.)
LVGL GUI Demo RT1060
Ardunio SIMCom Demo

12:00 – Lunch Break
13:00 – Zephyr® Hands-on LABS using NXP FRDM-MCXN947

Hello World: Import Sample, Build, Debug
Kconfig: Explore and Modify Kconfigs, Guiconfig Tool
Debugging with VS Code: Thread Awareness, Stack Usage, Thread Call Stack
Devicetree: MCUXpresso Device Tree Viewer, Board Overlay Files, Modifying Hardware Configuration

15:00 – Wrap Up / Q&A

New MCU projects must keep up with the increased hardware, software, and protocol complexity. Connecting the system to the Internet introduces another order of magnitude in complexity, as plans for security updates must be considered from the start.
Mustering these challenges in the confines of a software stack originally written by hardware vendors to get users started becomes almost impossible. A larger developer base can share the maintenance load of the “common infrastructure,” freeing developers to concentrate on the features which differentiate their products against the competition. The Free and Open-Source approach is a perfect match for this new landscape.
The cross-architecture, vendor-neutral, and permissively licensed Zephyr® OS is introduced to show how it can help development teams concentrate on product features instead of invisible (yet important!) infrastructure.
Please register on the link here.

Open Source Summit Europe (Vienna, Austria)
2024-09-16 - 2024-09-19
The Open Source Summit Europe, which takes place on September 16-18 in Vienna, Austria, is packed with technical content. It is the premier event for open source developers, technologists, and community leaders to collaborate, share information, solve problems, and gain knowledge, furthering open source innovation and ensuring a sustainable open source ecosystem.
As a conference umbrella, Open Source Summit is composed of a collection of microconferences covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today. Zephyr will be featured as a microconference. Check out the schedule below.
Monday, September 16
15:25 CEST: Bringing Existing Open-Source Code into MISRA Compliance – Roberto Bagnara, University of Parma and BUGSENG – Roberto Bagnara, Professor at University of Parma and BUGSENG
Bringing an existing codebase into MISRA compliance is known to be a difficult, risky and time-consuming task. Yet, when a product needs a functional safety certification and rewriting the software is out of question, this is a necessity. Such an endeavor requires facing multiple tradeoffs and, consequently, lots of experience both on the codebase and on MISRA. The choices between deviating the guideline, and the (often, many) ways in which code may be changed and deviations may be formulated, are tough and with consequences that are not immediately evident. The situation is particularly interesting in the case of open-source software, where additional challenges have to be faced. In this presentation, we illustrate our experience and the several lessons learned while undertaking MISRA compliance work in open-source projects, most notably the Zephyr RTOS and the Xen hypervisor, both used in many embedded systems. Key take-home points include: effective deviation strategies and mechanisms; dealing with the MISRA C essential type model (guidelines related to that account for many of the violations in existing codebases); interaction with open-source communities.
Tuesday, September 17:
9 am CEST: How to Contribute a Zephyr Sensor Driver – Maureen Helm, Distinguished Engineer at Analog Devices
The Zephyr sensor driver API is a popular area for new contributors to submit code upstream; a sensor driver is well-contained, it doesn’t touch more intimidating or complex subsystems, and most importantly, it enables your Zephyr application to interact with the physical world in a new way. Naturally, you want to share it with the open source community, but how do you do it? This talk will share best practices and common pitfalls encountered by new contributors submitting their first sensor driver, and provide insight into why maintainers request certain changes.
09:50 CEST: Zephyr Build System: Sysbuild and New Hardware Model – Torsten Tejlmand Rasmussen, Open Source Software Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor
The Zephyr build system had been reaching its limits in its ability to build multiple images for modern SoCs in its previous hardware model.
The original build system began with the concept of a simple board containing a single core SoC for which you would build a single image. In today’s world however, developers want to build multiple images for boards which may have multiple SoCs and / or SoCs with multiple CPU cores. This evolution towards complexity led us to the development and introduction of sysbuild and a new hardware model in Zephyr.
The purpose of this talk is to dive into the new hardware model, and what it provides seen from a developer’s point of view, and from there continue into sysbuild, where the new hardware model is leveraged in order to build multiple images for a single device. The talk will go over how you as a developer can make the best use of the new hardware model and sysbuild to effectively build a complete project.
11:00 CEST: Secure and Encrypted Boot in Zephyr RTOS – Parthiban N, Software Engineer at Linumiz
MCUboot enables secure booting of Zephyr RTOS using asymmetric cryptographic signature verification with a public key. The hash of the public key is embedded or compiled with the MCUboot binary by default, which is used for checking the integrity of the public key. To tamper-proof, as an alternate secure boot option, the hash of the public key can be stored securely and retrieved when hardware keys are enabled. Security of embedded SoC’s (e.g., i.MX RT) offers more capabilities, such as High Assurance Boot (HAB), Data Co-Processor (DCP), or Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M) implementing the Trustzone for SoC’s (e.g., nRF91) to enable secure storage with hardware crypto acceleration or external security modules (e.g., TPM, EdegeLock) to store keys in hardware vaults.
This talk will detail MCUboot secure booting with hardware keys. NXP i.MX RT as an example using HAB for booting singed and encrypted bootloader MCUboot, enabling hardware root of trust, and booting Zephyr RTOS using keys from OTP for verification. We will also see about using the TF-M backend and OTP for secure booting Trustzone-enabled SoCs.
11:20 CEST: Zephyr Network Subsystem Status and Overview – Jukka Rissanen, Principal Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor
Network connectivity is important part of Zephyr. This talk will give information of current status of the network stack.
11:55 CEST: Lightning Talk: The CFU: Custom Hardware with RISCV and Zephyr – Mohammed Billoo, CEO at MAB Labs Embedded Solutions
RISC-V’s instruction set architecture (ISA) has enabled seasoned embedded software engineers to experiment with FPGAs since numerous open-source RISC-V cores can be flashed onto an FPGA.
The Zephyr Project is rapidly emerging as a leading real-time operating system (RTOS). Zephyr integrates open-source and security best practices to ensure a vendor-neutral, secure, and reliable platform.
One of the exciting features of the RISCV ISA is the Custom Function Unit (CFU), which enables a framework to support custom operations in hardware, which is accessible from software. In this talk, Mohammed will demonstrate how to add a CFU into a RISCV core on an FPGA, and how to make the appropriate calls from Zephyr.
12:05 CEST Lightning Talk: Zephyr Portability with an AI Application on Very Different MCUs – Ales Ryska, Systems Engineer at NXP
Code portability is one of the compelling benefits of adopting Zephyr. In this session we will discuss a single AI-based face detection application that scales from a high performance, Arm Cortex-M7 based MCU to a low power Cortex-M33 based MCU with a neural processing accelerator. In addition to different main processor cores, these two platforms have quite different camera and display interfaces, and one has a limited frame buffer capability, leading to required improvements in the display driver which NXP has contributed back to the project. This session will also explore the specifics of how devicetree and Kconfig were leveraged to switch between platforms.
12:15 CEST: Lightning Talk: Using Zephyr to Power the Sustainable Cloud – Dan Kalowsky, Firmware Engineer at Ampere Computing
Share how Ampere Computing uses Zephyr to re-imagine the cloud in a more sustainable way. Covering some of the challenges encountered aligning product goals with Zephyr, adding new code coverage beyond the upstream support, and getting a test environments up and running.
12:25 CEST: Lightning Talk: Implementing the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) in the Zephyr Project – Adam Wojasiński, Software Engineer at BayLibre
In order for highly distributed communication to function well, there must be a reliable time source and a way to synchronize time between devices. In applications such as automotive and industrial control, the requirements here can be strict and subject to regulatory constraints. Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is a response to these hard time synchronization requirements by achieving clock accuracy in the sub-microsecond range.
As Zephyr becomes more broadly used in these environments, it needs support for precision timekeeping. This talk will cover a brief overview of PTP, discussion of various implementation choices for Zephyr, challenges along the way and upstreaming plans.
14:00 CEST: Developing Wildlife Camera Traps with Zephyr RTOS – Alex Bucknall, Software Engineer at Arribada Initiative
Monitoring wildlife and environmental changes often requires deploying remote camera traps that can capture imagery and activity over long periods of time. These camera systems need to be low-power, portable, and easily adapted to different hardware configurations based on project requirements.
This talk will cover how we utilised Zephyr to develop flexible time lapse camera solutions for conservation applications. We’ll explore our time lapse camera deployment in Bermuda and how we’re using Zephyr to monitor and understand the impact of seagrass decay on the local marine life. Zephyr allowed us to rapidly target different hardware platforms by abstracting away complex hardware interactions. We’ll discuss how Zephyr’s hardware and driver APIs simplify peripheral access to cameras, RTCs, and power management features across multiple vendor SoCs.
Additionally, we’ll explore challenges associated with this kind of cross-platform support, such as lack of core features for certain vendor SoCs. We’ll also share insights into optimising for size, performance, and battery life on constrained embedded devices.
14:20 CEST: Exploring the Potential of Zephyr in Automotive and Software Defined Vehicles – Philipp Ahmann, Sr. OSS Community Manager at Etas GmbH (BOSCH)
In the automotive industry more than 100 embedded control units (ECUs) are present in a typical car. They are equipped with microcontrollers responsible for various peripherals within the vehicle. Although it may be challenging to adapt automotive-specific interfaces to an IoT-driven RTOS like Zephyr, the use of standard peripherals such as GPIOs, I2C, and UART can lead to significant synergies with other products.
However, as starting point, the talk will delve into the automotive specific requirements and technology stacks necessary for integrating Zephyr into automotive development. Additionally, it will highlight areas where Zephyr may not yet be a perfect fit for automotive applications. Key touchpoints for discussion will include the compatibility of Zephyr with established automotive standards like Autosar, COVESA VSS, and CAN stack. Furthermore, the talk will address the challenges related to process compliance and adherence to safety integrity standards in the automotive industry.
This talk aims to initiate a discussion on the potential wider adoption of Zephyr in automotive products and to foster an engaging discussion among industry professionals.
14:55 CEST: Lightning Talk: Open Source Fleet Management in Zephyr – Maciej Sobkowski, Software Engineer at Antmicro
Complex, real-life embedded system deployments often consist of multiple SoCs/MCUs running a mix of OSes, ranging from user-facing high-end nodes based on Linux/Android to MCUs dedicated to controlling specific low-level functions of the device, using an RTOS like Zephyr. Over-the-air updates for such systems poses a challenge, as the firmware needs to be updated in a safe & coordinated way.
Remote Device Fleet Manager is a permissively licensed, fully open source and self-hostable framework for modular, configurable OTA updates, fleet management and ML data management that supports Linux, Android, and, since recently, also Zephyr-based platforms.
This talk will delve into how RDFM was extended to support Zephyr-based systems, the motivations and considerations of the development and some interesting use cases it enables. RDFM allows for fully redundant updates, incl. rollback to the previous version, grouped device updates and mixed OS deployments.
To enable tight interoperability with Zephyr’s ecosystem, the integration is based on the MCUmgr library, communicating with Zephyr devices via the SMP protocol. The MCUboot bootloader is used for managing the firmware on the device.
15:05 CEST: Lightning Talk: Delta Firmware Over The Air (DFOTA) Update: Optimizing Device Updates in Zephyr – Romain Pelletant, Embedded Software Enginner, & Clovis Corde, Embedded Software Engineer at Kickmaker
Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) updates are a well-established method for updating devices, but this approach shows its limitations in the embedded world. Indeed, in embedded systems we have 2 main constraints (among others) when discussing firmware updates : memory and bandwidth. Regarding memory, developing a low-memory-footprint API was our priority when creating this solution. To explain how we built this API, we will discuss compression algorithms and justify our choice of implementing in Zephyr the open-source library “Heatshrink” which is ideally suited for DFOTA’s needs and for embedded systems in general (we can demonstrate the memory footprint differences compared to the already implemented compression algorithm “LZ4”). Next, we will see how deltas (or patches) between two firmware versions are generated (we could present a benchmark to illustrate the data savings achieved by sending patches instead of the full firmware, as it is done during FOTA update). Further, we will explore the implementation of the DFOTA API to explain how it works and how it can be implemented into your project.
15:15 CEST: Lightning Talk: How to Create an Asset Tracker With Zephyr and Thingsboard In No Time – Tobias Marquardt, Embedded Software Engineer at grandcentrix GmbH
In this lightning talk I’ll show you how to create a working PoC of an asset tracker with very little effort by using Zephyr. It’s based on an off-the-shelf cellular SoC that sends GPS data over CoAP to the open source Thingsboard IoT cloud platform.
15:25 CEST: Lightning Talk: From Ideas to 3 Firmwares Powering Railway-Infrastructure Monitoring in 2 Years – Tobias Meyer, Software Firmware Developer at Konux GmbH

Using Zephyr OS, we successfully developed three firmware versions in under two years, establishing a scalable wireless sensor network for enhanced railway infrastructure monitoring.
This talk will detail the rationale behind our technology selections, including Zephyr OS, BLE, LTE-M, and AWS Iot Core.
We will discuss specific features of Zephyr that facilitated rapid development and the aspects that presented a learning curve. Our session will explore critical design decisions, architectural frameworks using Zephyr, and effective strategies for MCU communication and optimizing battery life. It will show how projects are setup, dependency are managed using west, how firmware is tested, and which features of zephyr we use where. We’ll also share common pitfalls and practical lessons learned.
Concluding with recent Zephyr updates and our reflective insights, this presentation will end with what we would have done differently this time.

16:00 CEST: Preparing Zephyr for Safety Element out of Context Certification – Nicole Pappler, Senior Safety Expert at AlektoMetis.com
Zephyr, as also other open source projects, is heading towards functional safety, to achieve a safety certification as a Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) the question of what this really means comes up quite often.
There are usually three stakeholders in a project like project community, the assessor and the user, who actually wants to use the certified software
As all these parties have different expectations of what this certification will require, there are a lot of different rumours and opinions out there regarding functional safety certification. This talk will give an introduction to what qualification evidence is usually prepared and assessed for a SEooC certification, what this means for the project and how it can actually be integrated into a safety relevant software system.
This talk will also give an update of the current status of the safety working group, how to participate and what to expect there.
16:55 CEST: Level Up Your Embedded Testing Game: FRETish, Robot, and Twister: A Dream Team – Christian Schlotter, Software Architect at Carl Zeiss Meditec AG & Tobias Kästner Bridle Maintainer at TiaC Systems
Developing embedded software for regulated environments like medical devices presents unique challenges. Crucially, we need to document how the software design fulfills stated product requirements. While functional testing remains dominant for verifying functional suitability, deriving and maintaining effective test suites can quickly become cumbersome.
This talk explores a novel approach to this longstanding problem. We leverage NASA’s FRETish method for formally capturing requirements. We will talk about how the formal nature of FRETish requirements allows for automatic test case generation leveraging the Robot Framework. The latter was specifically chosen as it is partially supported by Zephyr’s test harness today and allows to utilize twister for automated test execution of these test suites on real hardware. This method has the potential to streamline testing, offering benefits such as reduced time and maintenance efforts as well as accurate coverage metrics from very early on in the project’s lifecycle.
We’ll discuss our progress in implementing this approach, the challenges we encountered, and potential solutions for deeper integration with the Zephyr project.
17:45 CEST: Zephyr LPWAN: Connectivity Options and When to Choose Them – Jordan Yates, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Embeint
Developers are spoiled for choice when it comes to Low-Power Wide-Area-Network technologies, which can make it difficult to choose where to focus your time when starting a project.
In this session we will run through the advantages and tradeoffs of the various LPWAN solutions that Zephyr supports out of the box, with respect to power consumption, range, reachability and more.
Technologies to discuss include Bluetooth, WiFi, LTE CAT-M1, LTE NB-IoT, LoRa/LoRaWAN and Thread.
Thursday, September 19
9-12:30 CEST: Zephyr Workshop (Additional Fee, pre-registration required)
Registration Cost: $10
The Zephyr Workshop, sponsored by Infineon, is designed to introduce you to the leading Open Source RTOS built with safety and security in mind. Attendees will learn why Zephyr is gaining the attention of developers and product makers. This session will provide a general overview of the Zephyr OS along with an overview of how to begin building Bluetooth® Low Energy applications using Zephyr RTOS.
The hands-on portion of the session will feature the building of two connected applications using Infineon’s AIROC™ CYW20829 Bluetooth® LE MCU Evaluation Kit:

Sensor to Phone application – For this hands-on application, attendees will program a Bluetooth LE peripheral Zephyr application on the AIROC CYW20829 evaluation kit and connect it to a phone running the AIROC™ Bluetooth® Connect App.
Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR) application – For this hands-on application, attendees will program a PAwR Zephyr application on the AIROC CYW20829 evaluation kit. Each participant will communicate with a central node and see how a “many to one” Bluetooth LE network can be created.

** Notes:

Participants will use their own machines for the hands-on portion, and they will get to walk away with the Infineon AIROC CYW20829 Bluetooth LE 5.4 MCU Evaluation Kit.
Some (minimal) pre-work is needed to make the best use of the time allotted. An email will be sent to registrants prior to the event with further instructions.
Space is limited to 50 participants.

How to Register: Pre-registration is required. To register for Zephyr Workshop, add it to your Open Source Summit Europe registration.
To learn more about Open Source Summit, visit the main event website: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-europe/.
