Open Source Summit Europe 2025

The ODM ecosystem — such as the one found in Asia — offers a rich selection of pre-designed hardware intended for white-labelling. This hardware can be produced and shipped with short lead times. However, a typical weakness of these devices is their software, which usually consists of outdated kernels and poorly documented components. Wholesale replacement of the system’s software stack while leveraging the hardware offers a path toward creating robust devices that can sidestep many of the complexities of manufacturing a fully custom design.

In this session we share tips and learnings from our experience creating a replacement software stack using Yocto for an existing white-label IoT gateway device. With this approach, we were able to take a new device with an up-to-date Linux stack to production in under 6 months. 

The session will cover topics including: choosing of an appropriate hardware platform, coordinating with the hardware vendor, setting up an efficient development environment using similar hardware and simulators, and using the system’s OTA update infrastructure to create a factory image that’s compatible with an ODM’s existing manufacturing and testing flows.