The Adoption of IoT (Internet of Things) technology has grown at an enormous pace. Forbes.com has reported that spending on IoT will increase to $267 billion by the year 2020, indicating how important that the technology will become to businesses around the world. Nevertheless, IoT is not without its challenges. These include security, connectivity, and choosing the right OS best suited to address those issues.
The open source Zephyr Project is setting out to resolve these issues. However, solving those problems is only one part of the IoT puzzle. What is needed is innovation and normalization — two specific components that fit well into the world of open source, giving IoT adopters the ability to delve deeper into the software that underpins IoT functionality.
The Zephyr Project entered into the small OS and RTOS market with the intent of reducing fragmentation for developers in the IoT and embedded arena. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for software with respect to IoT adoption is trying to provide a solution that solves the problems of embedded development like connectivity, security, safety certification, and in the case of small OSs and RTOSs, all with the intent of ultimately delivering real-time responsiveness.
The Zephyr Project leverages the best-known methods of open source community development, like the Linux OS, to build an RTOS for IoT that attempts to address these types of issues. This mission has helped to create a collaborative community, which is constantly growing. The community includes a broad swath of those working in the embedded development space and encourages communications, collaboration, and the sharing of knowledge to continuously improve the project.
Growing the community and encouraging more to participate will help to accelerate the evolution of the Zephyr project and bring more capabilities to the table. With that in mind, the Zephyr Project is creating opportunities for additional community outreach.
To better serve the community and encourage additional participation, the Zephyr Project team will be hosting a booth at the forthcoming Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which takes place Oct. 23-25, 2017, at the Hilton Prague, Prague, Czech Republic. The Zephyr Project aims to expose the advanced features offered by Zephyr OS V1.90, as well as host technology sessions on Bluetooth Mesh with Zephyr OS and Linuxand Using SoC Vendor HALs in the Zephyr Project.
There is no doubt that the Zephyr OS codebase is evolving and becoming more important to the purveyors of IoT community. Nonetheless, strength comes in numbers and the Zephyr Project welcomes more participation from experts in the embedded community to help develop its open source platform.
The technical leadership from the project will be available at Booth L9 to answer questions about the code, discuss how to become involved with Zephyr Project, and convey the importance of the Zephyr Project to the future of IoT development.
What’s more, the Zephyr Project team will be offering demos on important components and capabilities that highlight the disruptive nature of the Zephyr OS and why it will be so important to the world of IoT. Those demos include:
- NXP Hexiwear
- Renode.io
- Bluetooth controller on Nordic
- Bluetooth Mesh
At the event, the Zephyr Project team will bring together knowledge, action, and insight that will help to bring much needed normalization to the IoT market. Please visit us at the Zephyr Project booth at Embedded Linux Conference in Prague, Oct. 23-25 to learn more about the project and how to become part of the community.