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The Off-Highway Kite — Zephyr Podcast #051

By September 18, 2026No Comments

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The summary below was automatically generated using the assistance of AI tools.

Episode Summary

  • A Week on the Road: The episode opens with a report from SIDO in Lyon, where the crowd turned out to be far less French-centric than the name suggests. Zephyr demos on the GigaDevice stand, a big ST presence with more of the same, and an unexpected amount of robotics. The people on the booths knew Zephyr was part of the deal and were happy to talk about it, which is not always how trade shows go.
  • Three More ZDS Talks: A Generic RF PHY Driver API for Proprietary Protocols from Texas Instruments, on the sub-GHz protocols that are neither Bluetooth nor Wi-Fi and that Zephyr largely does not support today; Where Zephyr Fits in Space Computer Architecture from Yasushi Shoji of Space Cubics, covering update policy, recovery paths, safe mode and FPGAs, and apparently the detail of where exactly Zephyr is on the moon; and Playing Audio on a SoC DAC Output from Eve Redero, which has DMA, a DAC and, we are told to expect, a demo. It is scheduled opposite the Linus Torvalds keynote, which is rough luck.
  • Automotive and Off-Highway: An RFC is open for an Automotive & Off-Highway Working Group, aiming at a diagnostics interface built on automotive protocols, requirements documentation and safety certification. “Off-highway” is the industry’s term for the vehicles that never see a road: tractors and the like, every bit as safety-critical as the ones that do. Nothing exists yet beyond the issue, so if this is your world, the useful thing you can do this week is go and comment on it.
  • native_sim on macOS: Another attempt at getting the native simulator running on macOS, and this one gets as far as hello world. The hard part has always been that macOS does not use ELF, which is what everything Zephyr takes for granted about iterable sections and linker magic depends on. The surprise is how contained the patch is.
  • USBTMC: With USB host support landing all over the place, here is something from the device side: the USB test and measurement class. It is the protocol behind the USB port on your oscilloscope or bench power supply, and it usually carries SCPI, a descendant of GPIB that is essentially AT commands with a strange capitalisation convention. Plug a Zephyr device implementing it into a measurement suite and it shows up in the UI on its own. The sample implements a trimmed-down SCPI parser rather than a general one. The PR is looking for reviews.
  • Two New Architectures: Merged in the same batch, weeks in the making: Qualcomm Hexagon, the DSP inside Snapdragon parts that does a lot of the audio and video encode and decode work your phone battery quietly depends on, and Infineon TriCore with the AURIX platform, which is the sort of thing running the engine in your car. Both arrive with the usual starter kit: QEMU, clocks, interrupts, serial. Both landed now because the 4.5 feature freeze is close.
  • A Multimedia Pipeline: A multimedia pipeline subsystem from NXP, intended as a collection of modules for sourcing, transforming, processing and sinking media, with hardware acceleration underneath. Whether it becomes genuinely portable infrastructure or stays NXP-shaped depends entirely on whether other vendors pick it up, but the ambition is the right one: pipelines that stay agnostic of the accelerator while still letting the accelerator do the work.
  • Enumerating Device Classes: Build-time device class enumeration builds on the earlier work that sorted drivers into classes. Until now there was no convenient way to iterate them; now there is a macro that hands you every ADC, or every I2C device, in one go. Handy for samples, and probably for applications that want to adapt to whatever hardware they were built for.
  • A Sensor That Is Whatever You Want: A generic emulated sensor that returns the values you tell it to. Zephyr already has emulators for specific parts; this one is deliberately anything at all, so you can push twenty g of acceleration at your application and see which code path it takes.
  • Deep Sleep on the RP2350: Deep sleep and suspend-to-RAM for the RP2350. The Pico family has a reputation for being poor at power management, so this is a welcome step, even if it is mostly a few calls into the underlying SDK. RP2040 owners should not get their hopes up.
  • Bring Your Own Serial Number: A generic NVMEM backend for hwinfo. The device ID API is where subsystems go to find a board’s unique serial, but not every part has one burned in, and sometimes you want your own number assigned at manufacturing. Write it through NVMEM, read it back through hwinfo, loop closed.
  • Boards: Six of them. The Infineon T2G-C2-D-6M, a dual Cortex-M7 plus M0+ with head-up displays in its sights. The ZedBoard, a Zynq-7000 board described as low cost at 619 dollars, which tells you something about FPGA pricing; a new west runner for openFPGALoader landed around the same time. The DHSBC STM32MP255C from DH electronics, a Raspberry-Pi-shaped board with dual A35 plus M33 and M0+, 4 GB of RAM, 16 GB of eMMC and Wi-Fi 6, with the Zephyr port targeting the M33. The BeagleBone AI-64, dual A72 with a Cortex-R that is where Zephyr runs, a heatsink on the underside and an M.2 E-key slot. The Shrike-fi, an ESP32-S3 paired with a Renesas FPGA that the open source toolchains do not cover. And the XIAO STM32C5, a 144 MHz M33 in the XIAO footprint, cheap and unremarkable in the best way.