Open Source Summit Europe 2025

Zephyr has extensive support for all kinds of embedded displays, but sourcing a display can be confusing, especially if you want to source one with out-of-the-box Zephyr support. In this session, we will show how to choose a Zephyr-friendly display component.

The session will cover a review of several types of display techs, what are display controllers and display modules, and the most common ways of interfacing with a display.

In this talk, we'll guide you through the exciting process of porting DOOM to the Zephyr RTOS. We’ll begin by introducing PrBoom, the game engine used for this port. Next, we’ll explore the Zephyr native simulator, a powerful tool that eases the entire porting process by offering robust debugging, testing, and profiling capabilities. Finally, we’ll delve into Zephyr’s display and input subsystems, components for capturing input from various devices (ADC, GPIO, Touchscreen) and rendering game frames on a screen. Last, we'll showcase the port running on actual hardware the NXP MCXN MCU demonstrating how Zephyr and PrBoom come together to bring DOOM to life in an embedded environment. Whether you're an embedded systems enthusiast or a gamer, this session will showcase the versatility of Zephyr in handling a classic game like DOOM.

Mirroring and controlling a smartphone via a vehicle’s screen enable hands-free access while ensuring comfort and safety. Existing solutions like Android Auto or CarPlay require high-end MPUs and rich OSes. In this talk, we demonstrate a lightweight and low-cost alternative using the i.MX RT1170 MCU running Zephyr RTOS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVt0pZxM8Xg

The Android phone captures its screen, compresses it in MJPEG, and streams it to the MCU. On the Zephyr side, we use ffmpeg for video decoding and send touch events to the phone. Despite no hardware decoder, we achieved 11 fps with 100–200 ms latency. MJPEG was chosen over H.264 for its better performance. Upcoming MCUs like the i.MX RT2660/RT2770 with MJPEG/H.264 hardware decoders will boost this further.

We are currently transitioning to Wi-Fi for a fully wireless set-up and offloading camera-based gesture control to the smartphone for hands-free controls. Finally, to inject touch events into Android without root access, the Android application needs to be launched in a shell by ADB from a laptop. We're working on porting ADB to Zephyr to automate this process for a seamless, plug-and-play user experience.

This talk outlines our ongoing efforts to achieve safety certification according to IEC 61508. While the audience is technically skilled, the specifics of safety standards might be unfamiliar. We will explore why software architecture is paramount (IEC 61508 mentions it more than 50 times) and discuss the difference between architecture and its documentation. We'll also clarify the distinction between project and product documentation, and the crucial relationship between safety and security. The talk will then shed light on some Zephyr-specific challenges, such as managing feature models via Kconfig and the implications of in-tree code generation scripts for our safety approach. We will provide an overview of our current state, including the now established coding guidelines and where we are at with implementing traceability mechanisms. Finally, we will take a look on the impact this certification effort will have on the project's future direction, emphasizing its importance for wider adoption in safety-critical applications. Our aim is to foster a clear understanding of the work involved and its significance, helping Zephyr grow as a leader in safety-critical systems.

In the dynamic world of software development, a well-defined test strategy is very important for ensuring quality and reliability. The Zephyr Project's testing activities have evolved organically to address immediate needs, however it lacked a formalized strategy. As the testing working group we developed a strategy that not only codifies existing practices but also covers new challenges, requiring a shift in our testing paradigm.

During the talk I will present the key elements of our strategy, like its objectives, main testing principles, roles and responsibilities, and other elements it is addressing. I will show how we plan to navigate the complexities of modern testing landscapes with a focus on effectiveness of the testing cycle without compromising the robustness and quality of the Zephyr Project.

Testing Bluetooth applications at scale is crucial but often complex due interoperability requirements and the difficulty of reproducing real-world scenarios in the lab. At Blecon, we've established a robust approach to verifying our Bluetooth firmware built on Zephyr, addressing the challenges that arise when scaling from development to production-level quality assurance.

In this session, we’ll share practical insights from our team’s experiences, including how we constructed a scalable test farm using nRF52840 dongles and implemented in-band tracing to capture performance data from field devices. We’ll also explore point characterisation techniques, from Bluetooth sniffers to RF test chambers, and highlight where simulation fits in to accelerate testing workflows.

Attendees will learn how they can use these approaches to improve reliability, accelerate development cycles, and enhance overall system visibility in their Zephyr Bluetooth devices.

The use of Zephyr in safety-critical domains poses a significant challenge with regard to certification. Since feature development in open-source projects is usually not driven by a centralized requirement specification, V&V become challenging tasks: The lack of a requirement specification makes the subject of validation hard to capture. Verification requires considerable effort for manual test creation. To address these issues, we explore a Model-Based Testing (MBT) approach for Zephyr, which involves the creation of a formal model of the system. Based on this specification, runnable test cases are automatically derived which pass if the actual software implementation aligns with the model. We present our approach of applying MBT to Zephyr's semaphore API, which uses TLA+ and generates runnable ZTest test cases. Given the promising results of our initial exploration, we want to share our ideas with the community to encourage further work in this area. We argue that an integration of MBT into Zephyr’s development cycle results in formal specifications of the system, which, combined with test generation, enable automated conformance testing and facilitate continuous certification.