Written by Jocelyn Li, Zephyr Community Member and Intel Zephyr Engineering Team Senior Manager
The 1st Open Source IoT Projects Seminar, hosted by the Intel Corporation, was held in Shanghai at the Intel Zizhu Office from June 11 -12. As one of the host projects, Zephyr project delivered 7 technical speeches, 2 demos and 1 hands-on workshop. More than 20 people, including developers and technical managers, attended the Zephyr technical sessions. Half are community customers including China Mobile, Shenzhen DJI Tech, Neusoft, National Intelligent Sensor Innovation Center, Beijing Yuanxin Technology, OFILM, TOP CHIP and Shenzhen startup Fei Kai Te, from 7 cities in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing and Wuhan).
Technical Sessions
- Zephyr project overview – how developers can use the Zephyr SDK for development and debug environment set-up
- Zephyr memory protection – implementations for thread isolation, stack overflow prevention and critical kernel data safekeeping
- Open source and functional safety – how Zephyr is achieving the open source compatibility with safety standards
- A softPLC reference solution with WebAssembly (WASM) built upon Zephyr
- Utilizing the Zephyr POSIX mode to accelerate pre-silicon software development
- A FW testing solution based on Zephyr test framework to accelerate the development of FW test cases
- The fundamental technical concepts of Bluetooth mesh, and key points of Bluetooth mesh implementations on Zephyr project (presented by Kai Ren, Bluetooth SIG leader)
Demos
Zephyr™ OS is being used in an increasing number of embedded use cases such as automotive and industrial where product developers benefit from the reduced cost and increase in functionality provided by running multiple operating systems on a system on a chip (SOC). This functionality allows a single piece of hardware to manage tasks of varying levels of criticality and gives product makers the full benefit of miniaturization and portability provided by multi-core SOCs. The demo shows that on top of ACRN (a lightweight hypervisor) a Clear Linux-based service operating system starts a privileged virtual machine running Zephyr OS and a standard virtual machine running another instance of Clear Linux.
The demo shows smart badge with Zephyr running on reel board. Smart badge joins a Bluetooth Mesh networking. Short click of the button on smart badge navigates each page. Long press of the button on “Name” page sends “Hi”.
The demo is from the startup company named as Fei Kai Te in Shenzhen, showing a full Swift compiler and runtime that runs on top of Zephyr. The product will be launched in August.
Workshop
The workshop provided a hands-on opportunity to set up the Zephyr SDK and customize the display on reel board.
This was the first Zephyr meetup in China. We have attracted significant attention and interest on Zephyr. Zephyr’s top 3 strengths from the community perspective are: multiple-architecture support, Bluetooth support, and Functional Safety are the top 3 strengths from community perspective. We are excited about the collaboration and discussions we had at the meetup and look forward to next meetup in China!
This is an exciting time to get involved with the Zephyr Project! If you’re new to Zephyr, take a look at our Getting Started Guide or our Contributor Guide. Or, you can join the conversation or ask questions on our Slack channel or Mailing List.