The Zephyr Project Meetup in Zürich was a great meetup for people interested in embedded systems and open source. Even though heavy snow made it hard to travel, many attendees still joined the event. Held at the Gardena Digital Hub, the meetup offered talks, presentations, and a chance to learn more about Zephyr RTOS.
As mentioned in the sneak peek pre-event blog of this meetup, the evening began with a warm welcome and lots of snacks, pizza, and drinks, thanks to Gardena. Despite the snowstorm, everyone was in good spirits and ready to explore Zephyr.
Welcome note & lightning talk from Gardena team:
Marc Lasch from Gardena started the event by explaining how the company uses Zephyr in their products. (Slides here)
Zephyr in Education?
Then, Johannes Neyer from ZHAW shared how Zephyr is used in educational settings for lab exercises, including topics like security, bootloaders, and operating systems. (Slides here)
Zephyr Behavior Tree
Gerson Fernando Budke from Leica Geosystems introduced the Zephyr Behavior Tree (ZephyrBT), a flexible tool for real-time systems. He showed how it helps in creating efficient control flows using the Groot2 IDE. (Slides here)
Short Update On Zephyr Release And Quiz
Then, Benjamin Cabe, developer advocate at Zephyr Project joined the meetup online and gave a quick update on the latest Zephyr release. He also hosted a fun quiz to test how well attendees knew Zephyr. The winners received Nordic-sponsored boards as prizes. Watch the release highlights here.
Porting Zephyr to the CH32V003 SGTM
Michael Hope spoke about porting Zephyr to the CH32V003 SGTM, a low-cost microcontroller. He discussed the challenges of working with limited memory and flash and the potential of this small chip. (Slides here)
Rethinking Embedded Development: Zephyr Through the Eyes of Model-Driven Engineering
Tobias Kästner, a Solution Architect for Medical IoT at inovex GmbH, wrapped up the talks with a session on model-driven engineering. He explained how Zephyr is not just an RTOS but also a model-driven framework that connects well with hardware development to improve embedded software. (Slides here)
After the talks, attendees took a break and then spent time networking, sharing ideas, and discussing their projects.
Special Thanks:
A big thank you to our event sponsors, Gardena for the venue, food and beverages, Nordic Semiconductor for the Development Kits and the Power Profiler Kits.
One of the highlights of the evening was the office tour led by Andreas Müller from the Gardena team. Attendees got a behind-the-scenes look at the company’s workspace and saw how Zephyr is used in real-life projects.
We also want to thank Reto Schneider, Marc Lasch, Adrian and the whole Gardena team for making this meetup possible.
We appreciate everyone who braved the weather to attend, and we can’t wait for the next meetup! For those who missed it due to the snow, don’t worry! We are already planning future meetups, so you can join the Zephyr community events again, learn from experts, and be part of the exciting developments in embedded systems.
Thanks again to everyone who made this meetup possible, and we look forward to seeing you at the next Zephyr Project event!
For more information about the 2024 events, stay tuned by subscribing to the Zephyr quarterly newsletter or connect with us on @ZephyrIoT, Zephyr Project LinkedIn or the Zephyr Discord Channel to talk with community and TSC members.