Zephyr Ecosystem: Learn more about about these Hardware Vendors/Platforms

The Zephyr Developer Summit, hosted under the first-ever Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague, Czech Republic, on June 27-30 included presentations, BoFs, and training designed for real time problem solving and deep discussions. More than 1,300 people registered for the EOSS conference – representing 375 organizations across 56 countries around the globe. Zephyr had 75+ technical sessions (in-person and on-demand) for 3 tracks focused on users of Zephyr, developers contributing upstream, and maintainer-specific topics.

All of the videos from the Zephyr Developer Summit can be found on the Zephyr Youtube Channel. Each week, we’ll highlight a few videos in a blog for easy access. Today, we’re featuring a few sessions that showcase hardware vendors and platforms including, “Enabling the Silicon Labs EFR Family in Zephyr – a Case Study from a Port’s Lifecycle,” “Running Zephyr RTOS on Cadence® Tensilica® HiFi 4 DSP,” “STM32 on Zephyr, What You Need to Know,” “Porting Zephyr OS for a SoC (Cortex-R5),” and “Introducing CHESTER Platform for Industrial IoT Applications.”

Enabling the Silicon Labs EFR Family in Zephyr – a Case Study from a Port’s Lifecycle – Karol Gugala, Engineering Manager at Antmicro, & Anders Pettersson, Director of Field Marketing at Silicon Labs

This joint talk by Silicon Labs and Antmicro will guide you through the process of enabling the EFR32 MCU family in the Zephyr Project, with all its ups and downs, presenting a timeline and lessons learned. The talk will detail adding Zephyr support for the Silicon Labs BG22 and XG24 platforms. A comprehensive overview of the entire process will be presented, starting from taking over a pre-existing codebase, getting it up to date with current Zephyr standards, resolving licensing issues, HAL co-dependencies, maintainership questions, prioritization in the face of customer demand, code freezes etc. etc. We will also provide an insight into the current status of the port and plans for the future, demonstrate examples (including BLE support) and explain how to use continuous integration driver testing in a simulated environment with Renode and how to plug in similar RTOS port development efforts into Zephyr’s testing infrastructure for a smoother experience in mainlining the work.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgZmoFh47M4[/embedyt]

Running Zephyr RTOS on Cadence® Tensilica® HiFi 4 DSP – Iuliana Prodan, Software Engineer at NXP

Running Zephyr on Arm® Cortex®- A or Cortex®-M cores is widely discussed and there are many examples on how to implement it. However, many Cortex®-based MCUs and MPUs are choosing to also incorporate on-chip DSPs to offload computationally-intensive tasks. The Cadence Tensilica HiFi 4 DSP is one such example of a high-performance embedded digital signal processor (DSP) optimized for audio, voice or neural network processing. This presentation will highlight how to harness the power processing of the DSP by running Zephyr RTOS on the DSP, while running Linux® OS on the main Cortex®-A core. This presentation will cover simple and more complex examples, such as “hello_world”, IPC samples and Sound Open Firmware. Attendees will learn how to launch the application on the HiFi4 DSP, how the HiFi4 DSP and main core communicate together, how to get the output of the application and how to debug. For all the examples, existing drivers and/or frameworks from Linux® OS and Zephyr RTOS will be used. This presentation will go into detail about changes that can be made in Linux® OS and Zephyr RTOS code so that both operating systems can be jointly used across various applications.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqwPljnm2_k[/embedyt]

STM32 on Zephyr, What You Need to Know – Erwan Gouriou, Principal Engineer at STMicroelectronics

How to configure my STM32 device clocks with device tree? What is the current state of Power Management support on STM32 devices? How to use it ? What about Trusted Firmware M Support ? These are some of the most frequently asked questions around STM32 devices in Zephyr. During this talk, Erwan, STM32 maintainers will answer these questions and will try to provide all the information required to enjoy Zephyr on STM32 with the less possible hiccups. This will also be the occasion to draw a picture on the state of support on the whole STM32 subsystem and related upcoming challenges.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-U0yXbmRs[/embedyt]

Porting Zephyr OS for a SoC (Cortex-R5) – M Tamseel Shams, Associate Staff Engineer at Samsung Semiconductor India Research

Embedded system design is an amalgamation of hardware and software. Advantage of using Zephyr is that it is a small kernel in comparison to many other RTOS available to us. The purpose of our talk is to share our knowledge on porting Zephyr OS to a new hardware. The talk will give an overview of porting steps to any new platform, in this talk we have taken example of porting on Cortex-R5 architecture. Along with that giving some insight on shell, UART and timer modules. This talk will also include issues/challenges faced while porting and its solutions, debugging using Trace32 (debugger), and debugging during runtime using RAM dump in the absence of any serial console devices. The talk will help developers to port their hardware’s more easily and avoid issues while porting or solve those issues in a better way.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdm57vpGMkA[/embedyt]

Introducing CHESTER Platform for Industrial IoT Applications – Pavel Hübner, CEO and Co-founder of HARDWARIO

In this talk, Pavel will introduce the CHESTER platform, which helps developers to address many industrial IoT use cases requiring LPWAN (LTE-M, NB-IoT, LoRaWAN) or satellite connectivity. CHESTER scales to many applications because of its rich hardware extension module ecosystem and multiple Zephyr RTOS mechanisms, which help developers craft a truly modular software design. HARDWARIO (the CHESTER platform vendor) provides CHESTER SDK, which imports nRF Connect SDK (NCS) from Nordic Semiconductor. This layer has multiple reference application implementations, subsystems, drivers, samples, and shields. All those additions, altogether with the Zephyr RTOS and NCS foundations, give CHESTER users (even newcomers) the super-powers to develop and deploy industrial IoT applications in a fast manner. The talk may inspire any IoT firmware engineer about the often forgotten paradigms, such as modularity, re-usability, coherency, and cross-dependency avoidance.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c2KRTPEp_E[/embedyt]

Watch the rest of the Zephyr Developer Summit videos here. The schedule and links to the PPT presentations can be found here. Photos from the EOSS can be found here.

For more information about the 2024 event, 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.