We are excited to announce the upcoming Zephyr Project Meetup in Garching, near Munich, Germany, happening on September 18, 2025, from 5:00 PM to 9:30 PM. This in-person event will bring together developers, embedded engineers, IoT innovators, and open source enthusiasts for an evening of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and networking.
Event details:
Venue: Microchip Technology
Address: Parkring 30-32, Garching, Munich, 85748, Germany
Map: https://share.google/RAdhtxkohyevoQIyZ
We are thrilled to have Microchip as our venue host and food & beverage sponsor, making this event possible.
Why Garching, Munich?
Garching, located just north of Munich, is a vibrant hub for technology, innovation, and research. With its strong industrial presence and proximity to world-class research institutions, it’s the perfect setting for an event that encourages collaboration between developers, hardware vendors, and the broader embedded systems community.
Why should you attend?
This meetup is a fantastic opportunity to:
- Learn about the latest Zephyr Project developments and upcoming features
- Get hands-on insights from industry experts and community leaders
- Connect with fellow embedded engineers, IoT developers, and open source contributors
- Engage in discussions about real-world use cases, technical challenges, and solutions
- Explore new hardware, tools, and contributions from the speakers
Whether you are an experienced Zephyr developer, an embedded software engineer exploring RTOS solutions, or simply curious about open source, this event has something for you!
What’s on the agenda?
5:00 pm – 5:30 pm: Welcome snacks & drinks, sponsored by Microchip
5:30 pm – 6:00 pm: Welcome & Introduction: Zephyr @ Microchip, Axel Petereit, Field Application Engineer, Microchip Technology
Axel warmly welcome the Zephyr community on behalf of Microchip. In this session, he will provide an overview of the current topics and initiatives that Microchip is working on in relation to the Zephyr project. Axel will highlight areas of active development, including our efforts to enhance Zephyr support across Microchip hardware platforms. Additionally, he will discuss key challenges we face, such as integrating new processor architectures, ensuring security and reliability, and collaborating effectively with the open source community.
6:10 pm – 6:25 pm: Zephyr RTOS on Reconfigurable Platforms – State of the Art, Bharathiraja Nallathambi, Embedded Engineer, Linumiz
Reconfigurable computing platforms such as FPGAs are gaining traction in embedded systems for their ability to adapt hardware to application-specific requirements. By deploying softcore processors—including RISC-V, MicroBlaze, Nios II, and OpenRISC—on FPGA fabric, developers unlock a flexible path for experimenting with CPU architectures, peripheral sets, and hardware/software co-design. Zephyr RTOS, with its modular and lightweight design, stands out as a capable operating system for real-time, scalable, and portable applications in this space.
This talk presents the state of the art of Zephyr RTOS on reconfigurable platforms. It examines currently supported softcore architectures, available SoC and board definitions, and the maturity of device drivers and subsystem integrations. Key challenges such as clocking, memory mapping, and interrupt handling will be discussed, along with opportunities for tighter hardware/software integration, custom accelerators, and safety-critical domains.
By capturing the present landscape of Zephyr RTOS on FPGA-based processors and reconfigurable architectures, the session will provide developers, researchers, and system architects with insights into where the technology stands today, its emerging use cases, and the directions it is heading.
6:30 pm – 7:00pm: Coffeecaller – a fully open-source product development example, Stefan Kraus, Andreas Kurz, Senior Software Engineer, UL Solutions, inovex GmBH
CoffeeCaller is an embedded device designed to coordinate coffee breaks between colleagues across an entire building. What began as a fun, free-time idea turned into an exploration of different product development approaches within the constraints of hobby time and budget. The goal wasn’t just to build something functional, but to try out techniques that could scale—from quick iterations to structured hardware-software integration.
We will show our journey from the idea to the finished project, that started with a simple proof of concept to validate the approach, followed by parallel development of hardware and software: While one created a custom hardware design in KiCad, the other development the actual application with Zephyr RTOS at the same time. We describe how we created the device tree as a bridge between both, keeping things modular and maintainable. We first implemented BLE Mesh for communication, later transitioning to openthread for broader connectivity. The entire project, including hardware and firmware, is open source.
7:00pm – 7:15pm – Break Time
7:15pm – 7:45pm: ZSWatch – The Open-Source Smartwatch, Daniel Kampert, Embedded Engineer, ETO Group GmbH
ZSWatch is an open source smartwatch project that received NGI0 funding in December. This support allowed us to revisit the entire concept and improve every aspect of the device. In this presentation, I will share the latest developments and insights, including the new Watch Development Kit, a redesigned programming dock, a heart rate monitoring extension, major software enhancements, and our new blog and mailing list. We will also showcase the hardware evolution, comparing the original watch, the new development kit, and the current heart rate solution.
7:55pm – 8:10pm: “Everything can become a config”, Tobias Meyer, Device Team Lead, Konux GmBh
A short developer user story, how we used the concept of zephyr modules to move most functionality into a shared module and how zephyr helps here.
Topics are:
– why zephyr helps to build new products faster using reusable code.
– How we use at konux a shared library to focus more and more on business logic
– Integration with kconfig and how building a new application becomes more and more about configuration.
– Changes from “monorepo” into split repos
8:20pm – 8:50pm: Zephyr Squared, Hugh Breslin, Subject Matter Expert, Microchip
Have you ever run Zephyr and Linux side by side on the same device, in the same CPU cluster? Have you ever been developing for Linux and gone “this would be way easier in Zephyr”? With PIC64 and PolarFire SoC anything is possible!
This presentation will guide through the power and potential of an RTOS and OS combination and look down the road of the many ways this could be implemented.
We’ll see how you can run Linux and Zephyr side by side in an Asymmetric MultiProcessing mode (AMP) and then finally see how we can have 32x 32 bit cores running Zephyr while being managed by Linux.
8: 55pm – 9:00pm – Closing remarks, Zephyr Project
9:00pm onwards – Networking time
Reminder:
The Zephyr Project Meetup in Garching promises an evening full of insights, collaboration, and community building.
📅 Mark your calendars: September 18, 2025
⏰ Time: 5:00 PM – 9:30 PM
📍 Location: Microchip Technology Germany II GmbH & Co. KG, Garching, Munich
Seats are limited, so make sure to register early and secure your spot.
Come, connect, learn, and be part of the growing Zephyr Project community. See you in Garching!
About the Community Meetups:
This meetup is part of the Zephyr Community Meetup Series, gatherings hosted by community members, with support from the Zephyr Project.
If you are excited about the Zephyr Project and want to share it with your local community, consider hosting an event in your city. Whether you are in Munich or halfway across the globe, we encourage passionate individuals to get involved. Reach out to us and explore how you can bring Zephyr to your community and make a difference in the world of IoT development.
To keep up to date about the project, subscribe 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.