This blog is written by Tomohiro Kaneko(@misoji) a Hardware and Hobbyist engineer. (Discord usernames in brackets).
The Zephyr Project Meetup in Toyosu, Tokyo was the third Zephyr Project Meetup in Japan this year, and it was a special edition co-located with Open Source Summit Japan 2025. In this recap, we share highlights from the meetup, from the sessions to the conversations that continued after the talks.
Venue
The meetup took place on December 8, 2025 at Renesas Electronics Corporation’s Toyosu Office, and it was held in conjunction with Open Source Summit Japan. Toyosu is about a 20-minute taxi ride from Toranomon, where the summit was held, which made it easy for summit attendees to join after the conference program.
Despite the late hour of the gathering, the Renesas team extended a warm and polite welcome to all attendees.
Photo highlights from the venue included:
- This meetup was held in conjunction with Open Source Summit Japan.
Reception at Renesas Electronics Corporation’s Toyosu Office
The meetup welcome slide
Session Highlights
- A scene from one of the presentation sessions during the meetup.
Welcome note & State of the Zephyr project – Kate Stewart
Kate Stewart highlights the rapid growth of the Zephyr project, which now supports over 900 boards and maintains a high contribution rate of 3.5 commits per hour.
She emphasizes the project’s shift toward functional safety certifications (IEC 61508 and ISO 26262) and long-term security support. The ecosystem continues to expand with new members and improved tools for security compliance, such as SBOM generation.
Extreme Macro Photography with Zephyr – Maximilian Huber
Maximilian Huber presents a hobby project using Zephyr to automate extreme macro photography with magnifications up to 20x.
He utilizes Zephyr’s state machine framework and Bluetooth stack to precisely control a motorized camera rail and a Sony camera. The setup demonstrates Zephyr’s capability to manage complex hardware interactions and real-time settle times for high-precision imaging.
Zephyr on the rise for Automotive? – Philipp Ahmann
Philipp Ahmann discusses Zephyr’s potential in automotive as microcontrollers evolve into high-performance processors requiring features like AI, GPUs, and advanced networking. He notes that Zephyr attracts modern developers and offers faster innovation to extend beyond the traditional, rigid AUTOSAR environments. However, he stresses the necessity of collaborative hardenin of the code upstream to meet strict automotive production quality standards.
TI’s Journey with Zephyr – Khasim Syed Mohammed
Khasim Syed Mohammed describes TI’s adoption of Zephyr across a wide range of hardware, from tiny MSPM0 MCUs to complex multi-core SOCs like the Cortex A53.
He emphasizes Zephyr’s scalability and its pre-integrated software stacks, such as networking and power management, as vital for automotive and industrial sectors. The journey focuses on easing the transition for engineers moving from traditional environments like AUTOSAR or FreeRTOS to an open-source ecosystem.
Comparing Edge AI Performance at Zephyr: Pico vs Pico 2 – @misoji_engineer
@misoji_engineer compared Edge AI performance between Raspberry Pi Pico and the new Pico 2 running on Zephyr. Using the RP2040 and RP2350 based boards, he evaluated models generated by Edge Impulse, covering the workflow of exporting the C++ SDK and integrating it into a Zephyr application. His benchmarks highlighted the significant inference speed improvements achieved by the Pico 2’s Cortex-M33 core and hardware DSP compared to the original Pico.
Rust on Zephyr: trial – Kenta Ida
Kenta Ida introduced how to integrate Rust into the Zephyr RTOS. He walked through how to manually modify the SDK manifest (west.yml) to enable the zephyr-lang-rust module.
The presentation covered basics like project structure and GPIO control via Device Tree, as well as I2C sensor and Bluetooth integration using CFFI. It demonstrated that Zephyr’s features can be effectively utilized despite current limitations, and all sample code is available on GitHub.
Space Sciences and Technology Conference report -Yasushi Shoji
Yasushi Shoji reported on the presentation by his company, Space Cubics, at the Space Sciences and Technology Conference (SSTC), Japan’s largest space event. Marking the “1st Ever Expose of Zephyr” at the conference, he showcased a heterogeneous space computing system that runs Zephyr on RISC-V and Cortex-R5F cores, while simultaneously running Linux on high-performance Cortex-A72 cores.
By providing affordable and reliable space computers, they are working to reduce development costs and lower the barriers to entering the space industry
Zephyr Community Activities in Japan – Hiroshi Tokita, and more
Hiroshi Tokita presented an update on the growing Zephyr community in Japan. He shared the meetup schedule for 2025 and proposed plans for 2026, covering cities across the country.
He also emphasized that Zephyr is already embraced by various communities in Japan. He expressed hope that the Zephyr community will continue to grow through loose collaborations with these diverse groups.
After-Party
The fun didn’t stop after the presentations. As a special souvenir, attendees received Zephyr-branded kites!
After the event wrapped up, a group of us headed to the nearby LaLaport Toyosu for a casual dinner to keep the conversation going. It was a truly wonderful event from start to finish.
Thanks to:
We recently had the opportunity to participate in the Zephyr Project Meetup in Toyosu, Tokyo.
We want to extend a special thank you to all the speakers who shared their expertise and insights. Your contributions were outstanding.
Additionally, this event would not have been possible without the support of many dedicated individuals. Our deepest gratitude goes out to:
-The team from Renesas Electronics Corporation (especially Harunobu Kurokawa (@kurokawa[Renesas])) *Discord usernames in brackets
-The Zephyr RTOS User Group – Japan (especially Hiroshi Tokita (@soburi), Yasushi Shoji (@yashi))
Thank you all for making this a memorable experience!
For more photos from the meetup, check here.