The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#653 – Benjamin Cabé Nose Zephyr

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Welcome Benjamin Cabé of The Zephyr Project!

  • Benjamin is the developer advocate at The Zephyr Project, which is both a Real Time Operating System and an ecosystem (or almost like a “distro”, rather than an OS)
  • Benjamin does videos on the Zephyr YouTube and maintains an awesome blog / newsletter
  • The ecosystem is deep: Chris recently learned there is a state machine framework
  • Multiple people involved in dev like an OS
  • The Platinmum Members includes chip companies like NXP, Nordic, ADI
  • There are 600+ boards supported in the ecosystem (and more if you do custom)
  • Devicetree is a tough concept, but a powerful one that was borrowed from Linux
  • Who is the audience for Zephyr?
  • Chromebook embedded controller
  • What’s the smallest processor that Zephyr can run on? M0s can run it no problem
  • Chris thinks one of the benefits is the ability to bolt new stuff on to a project
  • Simulation through Wokwi (Past Guest Uri) or Renode (Past Guest Michael)
  • Using different levels of abstraction
  • zephyr i2c init
  • Benefits of abstraction
    • Swapping out chips (bubblegum tapshoes)
    • Tying stuff together (bolting stuff on)
    • Infrastructure with CI/CD
    • Zephyr doesn’t have an official IDE but VScode “just works”
    • Helper tools from Nordic
    • Open Source
    • Hobby projects
    • Dev survey
    • Custom Keyboards (ZMK)
    • RP2040 support
    • Arduino recenlty joined the project
    • Layers of abstraction
      • Architecture (ie. arm, nios2, x86)
      • SOC (available peripherals surrounding the core)
      • Board (PCB definition which might have:)
        • SOC
        • Memory
        • Peripherals / Sensors
        • Check the tree and PRs for sensors that might be in-flight
        • Compared to Arduino IDE
        • Choosing ecosystems
        • Weekly newsletter
        • Things you didn’t know you needed: NMEA subsystem
        • In Jay Carlson’s 2nd appearance on the show, he said “I’m reading more code than I’m writing”
        • Benjamin’s profile photo is of his artificial nose he created a few years ago
        • Making a machine model for bread (pandemic)
        • It uses TFLite
        • What is the project doing? (in parallel)
          • Acquire data
          • Machine learning inference
          • Display update
          • Network interface
          • Benjamin reimplemented the Nose in Zephyr using ZBus (Chris recorded a video with the author of this subsystem)
          • Like an MQTT broker on device
          • Some of the concerns I (Chris) had when I was starting was not understanding RTOS concepts (threads, queues, etc). Brian Amos was on the show talking about his book, which is a great way to get started with these ideas.
          • Threading / work queues
          • The importance of a project when starting out
          • Starter hardware
            • Hero devkits (Chris likes the nRF9160-DK as a starter board or the nRF5340-DK)
            • M5stack boards
            • iMX8
            • Jumping down to Zephyr from Linux
            • MPU + MCU
            • Tight integration
            • Zephyr can run POSIX code
            • What about the the RT in RTOS? Does this operate realtime often? (timing critical)
            • BOM cost and software cost
            • Security and dependencies
            • Join the Zephyr discord to talk to other people using Zephyr
            • TechTalks / YouTube
            • Interested in going to a conference in Seattle in 2024 for Zephyr? The ZDS / EOSS CFP is open now!
              • ...more
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              The Amp Hour Electronics PodcastBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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