The Zephyr Project Welcomes Adafruit Industries to its Open Source Ecosystem

Zephyr RTOS will be on Display at Embedded World in Demos from Antmicro, Foundries.io, Nordic Semiconductor and PHYTEC

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Feb 24, 2020, 10:00 ET

NUREMBERG, Germany, Feb. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Zephyr™ Project, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) in space-constrained devices, kicks off 2020 by welcoming new member Adafruit Industries and displaying new solutions at Embedded World on February 25-27 in Nuremberg, Germany.

Adafruit makes open source hardware, tutorials and code for makers to create DIY electronic products. Adafruit joins member companies including Antmicro, Eclipse Foundation, Foundries.io, Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP®, Oticon, SiFive, Synopsys, Texas Instruments and more to create an open hardware and software ecosystem using the Zephyr OS.

"We see amazing increases in computing power on edge microcontrollers, and the new wireless technologies coming out allow connectivity for short and long range networks," said Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Founder & Engineer at Adafruit. "Managing the complexities and security requirements of IoT requires a powerful RTOS that makes development and deployment easy. Zephyr is the leading RTOS we see for cross-platform development and well-thought-out security needs."

"Adafruit has been making open source hardware for more than a decade and has been a key driver and influencer in the open source community," said Kate Stewart, Senior Director of Strategic Projects for The Linux Foundation. "Their expertise will be essential to the expansion of the Zephyr ecosystem and deployment of the functional safety and security for the RTOS. We are excited to welcome them into our community and look forward to collaborating with them."

A Growing Community
With the vendor-neutral open source environment, contributors have played an integral role in advancing the Zephyr RTOS. Last year, more than 500 contributors helped launch the 1.14 LTS release, which offers vendors a customizable operating system that supports product longevity, security and interoperability. Since then, the community has hit several additional milestones and now has more than 600 active contributors and support for more than 200 boards. In fact, last month Zephyr had 1390 commits - which equates to almost 2 commits an hour.

The Zephyr Project Technical Steering Committee is currently planning a 2.2 release later this month with new features such as:

CAN support to include the CANopen protocol through integration of the third-party open source CANopenNode stack. A new sample application to demonstrate how to use the CANopenNode stack was added for the NXP TWR-KE18F and FRDM-K64F boards.
LoRa support was added through integration of the Semtech LoRaWAN endpoint stack and addition of a new SX1276 LoRa modem driver. New sample applications to demonstrate sending and receiving LoRa packets were added for the 96Boards WisTrio board.
AArch64 architecture support to support Arm Cortex-A53 platforms. This extends Arm core support in Zephyr from existing Cortex-M and Cortex-R cores to now include the first Cortex-A core.

Embedded World
The Zephyr Project will be on site at Embedded World this week. Several members will be giving presentations that include Zephyr and the RTOS will be featured in products and solutions at member and contributor booths such as Antmicro (4A-621), Foundries.io (5-440), Nordic Semiconductor (4A-310), PHYTEC (1-438) and RISC-V (3A-536). More details about the demos can be found here: https://www.zephyrproject.org/sneak-peek-zephyr-project-at-embedded-world/

Additionally, Zephyr will be featured in several presentations, including one from Kate Stewart. On Wednesday, February 26 from 12:30-1 pm, Stewart will present, "Safety Certification and Open Source – Can They Work Together?" More information about her talk as well as presentations from Bluetooth SIG and Nordic Semiconductor, can be found here: https://www.zephyrproject.org/embedded-world-february-25-2020-february-27-2020/

To learn more about Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog.

About the Zephyr™ Project
The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

Media Contact:
Maemalynn Meanor
The Linux Foundation
[email protected]

SOURCE The Zephyr Project