The Zephyr Project community is heading to Munich, Germany!
Join us on Friday, November 13, 2026, from 9:00 AM–12:00 PM for an in-person Zephyr Project Meetup, co-located with edge lab LIVE! at electronica 2026.
The event is open to developers, engineers, contributors, students, technology professionals, and anyone interested in open source, embedded systems programming, and software development. Whether you are an experienced Zephyr developer or just beginning to explore embedded technologies, you are welcome to join.
As the Zephyr Project celebrates its 10th anniversary, this meetup offers an opportunity to connect with fellow community members, exchange development experiences, and explore how Zephyr is used in embedded applications.
About the Organizer
This event is organized and managed by edge lab LIVE!, with support from the Zephyr Project. The meetup will take place in the edge lab LIVE! area at electronica 2026, bringing the Zephyr community together for a morning of technical learning and networking.
Registration, admission, and event arrangements are managed directly by the edge lab LIVE! team.
Event Details
- Date: Friday, November 13, 2026
- Time: 9:00 AM–12:00 PM CET
- Venue: Messe München, Hall C5, edge lab LIVE! area
- Location: Munich, Germany
- Organizer: edge lab LIVE!
- Registration: Check here.
About the Sessions
The morning will feature presentations covering products powered by Zephyr, project subsystems, development experiences, and features you may not have explored yet.
Connect with the local community, exchange ideas, and learn more about reliable, low-power embedded systems. Whether you are exploring Zephyr for your first project or already using it in embedded products, the sessions offer an opportunity to learn from others and gather ideas for your own work.
Agenda:
9:00 am – 9:15 am – Welcome note – Edgelab Live Team
9:15 am – 9:35 am – Getting OTA Working on Zephyr: It Can’t Be That Difficult, Can It? – Iain Menzies-Runciman, EdgeBench.io
I’ve spent years working with embedded Linux using OTA updates with Mender and A/B root filesystems. So when I discovered that Mender also had a client for Zephyr, I thought it would be interesting to see how difficult it would be to get it working on a microcontroller.
As it turns out, quite difficult. Starting with an ESP32, I set out to build a complete OTA update system. Not just connecting to a server and downloading a file, but installing new firmware, rebooting into it and retaining the ability to roll back if something went wrong.
Along the way, I encountered TLS problems, memory exhaustion, Ethernet driver issues, stack overflows and a few misunderstandings about how MCUboot, Zephyr sysbuild and Mender fit together. Eventually, after abandoning the ESP32 in favour of an NXP FRDM-MCXN947, I had a working system.
In this talk, I’ll walk through the problems I encountered, how I investigated and resolved them, and what I would do differently if I were starting again. I’ll also look at the security considerations that separate a working demonstration from something suitable for production.
The result is a practical look at what it really takes to implement OTA updates on Zephyr, from the perspective of an embedded Linux engineer learning that microcontrollers have their own ideas about how things should work.
9:40 am – 10:00 am – Zephyr Snow Predictor, Loic Domaigne, Doulos
Autumn has started, winter will come. In some regions of the world, like here in Munich, this often rhymes with snow.
In this talk, we will discuss how to implement a standalone Edge AI snow predictor for micro-controllers based on the evolution of physical quantities like temperature, humidity, or pressure.
We will show:
- what it means to create and train a neural network model,
- how to run an inference model on Zephyr using tflite-micro
- how Zephyr Ecosystem helps during the product development lifecycle
The demo will target an Arduino nano 33 BLE sense, but we will use the abstractions offered by Zephyr to keep our firmware portable.
Benefits for the audience:
Attendees will get a behind-the-scenes look at the “create model” button in their AI-studio and learn some best practices for implementing Edge AI solutions on Zephyr.
10:05 am – 10:25 am – Konfig & Devicetree: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Joe Schneider, Dojo Five.
Zephyr has a famously steep learning curve, and even once you’re past it, it’s not always clear what you actually gained — or what you’re still paying for. This talk takes a hard look at two of Zephyr’s foundational mechanisms, Kconfig and Devicetree, through the lens of real project experience. We’ll cover what these systems genuinely get right (flexibility, hardware abstraction, build-time configurability), where they cause friction or confusion in practice (debugging overlays, config sprawl, tooling gaps), and where they can actively work against you if you’re not careful — including a look at Zephyr’s Devicetree being resolved entirely at compile time, unlike Linux’s exchangeable, runtime-loadable DT blobs, and what that means for teams that need dynamic hardware reconfiguration. The talk closes with a forward-looking view: how these mechanisms are evolving, and what teams adopting Zephyr today should watch for. Aimed at engineers who are past the “hello world” stage and want an honest, experience-based assessment rather than marketing material.
10:30 am – 10:50 am – Bringing Robust OTA Updates to Zephyr: Real-World Insights & Approaches, Ed Watson, Northern.tech
As real-time operating systems like Zephyr become the go-to for resource-constrained and latency-sensitive applications, enabling secure and robust over-the-air (OTA) updates is more important than ever. In this session, Luis Ramírez-Vargas, Embedded Linux Customer Engineer for Mender, will share practical insights on implementing OTA update capabilities for Zephyr-powered devices. Drawing on community feedback and early field experience, this talk will walk through proven approaches to OTA update enablement, key technical considerations for OTA for Zephyr, and common challenges developers face when updating real-time operating systems at scale. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how to bring modern OTA update capabilities to their Zephyr-based projects.
10:55 am – 11:15 am – CRA-Ready by Design: What Zephyr Gives You – and Why Staying Upstream Matters, Andreas Kofler, bavariamatic GmbH
Vulnerability reporting under the Cyber Resilience Act has applied since September 2026, and from December 2027 every product with digital elements placed on the EU market must meet its essential requirements. For teams building MCU-based products, the choice of RTOS, and how closely you stay with it, has become a compliance decision.
This talk maps CRA requirements to concrete Zephyr building blocks: secure boot and firmware updates with MCUboot, SBOM generation with west spdx, TF-M and PSA, the project’s security process and LTS releases. It then makes the case for staying upstream: every out-of-tree driver or private fork is code you alone have to monitor, patch and support for the entire support period. Drawing on Bavariamatic’s recent mainline contribution of SmartFusion2 SoC-FPGA support, the talk shows what it takes to get there and why it pays off.
Finally, it is honest about the gaps no RTOS closes for you, from risk assessment and support period to update infrastructure and vulnerability handling, and gives attendees a practical checklist for their own Zephyr-based product.
11:20 am – 11:40 am – Root of Trust to Release: Boot-Level Security with Zephyr and MCUboot on the PIC32CK, Joe Schneider (Dojo Five) & Axel Petereit (Microchip).
The EU Cyber Resilience Act makes secure boot and secure updates a requirement for connected products sold in Europe. Vulnerability reporting obligations took effect in September 2026, and the full set of essential requirements applies from December 2027. For most embedded teams, the boot chain is where those requirements hold up or fall apart.
This session starts where many real attacks do: with an unsigned, unencrypted firmware binary posted on a manufacturer’s website, and modern AI tools that make reverse engineering it fast. From that first discovered vulnerability, the session plays out as a contest between an attacker and a connected device. Each time the attacker gets in, we add the defense the CRA calls for: signed images verified by MCUboot on every boot, protection against rollback to vulnerable firmware, and closing the debug port. The session is built around the Microchip PIC32CK SG01 and the Curiosity Nano+ Touch board every attendee takes home. We show how the PIC32CK’s Cortex-M33, TrustZone, and isolated Hardware Security Module anchor the chain of trust in silicon, and what it takes to move from a working demo to a production device.
Attendees leave with:
- A step-by-step map from CRA essential requirements to specific boot, update, and debug protections.
- A working model of MCUboot’s signing, verification, and upgrade flow in Zephyr
- Production guidance on firmware encryption, key custody, anti-rollback, and debug lockdown.
- Code to reproduce the session on their own board
11:45 am – 12:00 pm – Thank you note & Networking
Registration
Registration is required to help the organizers plan the space and event logistics. Seats are limited, so we encourage you to register early to secure your place.
Register directly with edge lab LIVE! for free admission to the Zephyr Meetup and a free one-day pass to electronica. No discount code is required.
For questions about registration, admission, or event arrangements, please contact info@edgelablive.com.
You can also join the Zephyr Project Discord server to participate in community discussions.
Thank You to Our Supporters
Thank you to edge lab LIVE! for organizing and managing this meetup and bringing the Zephyr community together at electronica 2026. We also appreciate the speakers, volunteers, and attendees whose participation makes this event possible.
Support an Upcoming Zephyr Meetup
Interested in sponsoring development board giveaways or food and beverages for an upcoming Zephyr meetup? Complete the sponsorship interest form, and our organizers will contact you with event details and coordination information.
About the Zephyr Community Meetups
This meetup 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 Munich or another part of the world, we encourage community members, companies, universities, and developer groups to get involved. Contact meetups@zephyrproject.org or complete the meetup interest form to explore how you can bring Zephyr to your community.
We look forward to seeing everyone in Munich!