More than 380 people registered for the 2nd Annual Zephyr Developer Summit, which took place on June 8-9 in-person in Mountain View, CA and virtually for attendees around the world, to learn more about the fastest growing RTOS. We hosted a “Zephyr Intro Day” on June 7 and had 4 tracks, 2 mini-conferences, 2 tutorials, 54 sessions and 58 speakers who presented engaging technical content, best practices, use cases and more. We’ll be adding event videos each week to the Zephyr Youtube Channel.
Today, we’re featuring all of the presentations that showcase how Zephyr RTOS works easily with hardware including, “What Chip Shortage? How We use Zephyr for Truly Modular Hardware,” “Mini-Conference: RISC-V Support in Zephyr,” Using Zephyr for Embedded Controllers,” and “Renode’s Zephyr Dashboard: Simulating 130+Zephyr Platforms.” Watch the videos below or click on the session title for links to the PDF of the presentations.
“What Chip Shortage? How We use Zephyr for Truly Modular Hardware” – Chris Gammell, Developer Relations Lead, and Mike Szczys, Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth
Hardware companies are facing daily struggles with the global chip shortage. Often the solution is to re-design a board with different processors, sensors, or architectures. In this talk, we highlight the Aludel, an internal hardware platform we’ve built as a customizable solution that can switch out hardware pieces without major redesign. This modular hardware showcases a path for hardware firmware teams to unify their codebase using Zephyr while targeting a wide range of hardware. Being able to swap out a sensor, microcontroller, or radio but keep the main board is really powerful. Zephyr makes it easy to manage firmware pipelines to hardware variants. We use standardized board-to-board connectors instead of making custom PCBs for different variants, but a similar firmware build solution works for both. Our approach embraces a flexible hardware design and an RTOS that’s built for it.
“Mini-Conference: RISC-V Support in Zephyr” – Michael Gielda, VP of Business Development at Antmicro; Ederson de Souza, OS Development Engineer at Intel; Pete Warden at Stanford and Piotr Zierhoffer, Engineering Manager at Antmicro
The Mini-Conference features several topics and speakers that focus on different aspects of RISC-V Support in Zephyr RTOS including:
- Multi-core RISC-V Devices in Zephyr: SMP Support for RISC-V – The Road So Far and What Lies Ahead – Ederson de Souza
- Zephyr in ML Use Cases with RISC-V – Pete Warden
- Opportunities and Challenges in Configurability of the RISC-V ISA – Peter Zierhoffer
“Using Zephyr for Embedded Controllers“- Keith Short, Software Engineer at Google
Overview and demo on how Zephyr is used as the basis for embedded controllers on Chromebooks. This talk cover:
- Why Google chose Zephyr for ECs on all new Chromebooks
- What Zephyr features are important to ECs
- What features Google plans to add to the Zephyr main tree
- How Google qualified it’s Zephyr based EC firmware The demo will show Zephyr running the EC on a Chromebook reference design.
- The demo will briefly cover the Zephyr subsystems used by the EC application.
“Renode’s Zephyr Dashboard: Simulating 130+Zephyr Platforms” – Michael Gielda, VP of Business Development and Piotr Zierhoffer, Engineering Manager at Antmicro
The Renode Zephyr Dashboard is an interactive dashboard presenting hundreds of Zephyr binaries running in Renode, Antmicro’s open source simulation framework. The project utilizes the systematized information from Zephyr, using device trees to describe the platform information – and mapping that onto Renode’s building block oriented nature. This allows us to build and run various applications such as TF Lite Micro, micro-ROS, MicroPython over 130+ Zephyr targets, spanning multiple architectures and vendors. The results include automatically generated asciinema screencasts, binaries, execution traces, SBOM information and more; you can reproduce the runs using a few simple commands. We will demonstrate how, using the techniques employed to build the Zephyr Dashboard, you can enhance your Zephyr development environment with Renode’s debugging, inspection, testing and CI features.
If you have questions or would like to chat with any of our Zephyr speakers, ambassadors or members of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), please join us on Discord.
