Year: 2023

With the Zephyr 3.4 release being less than a month away, there is increased activity in the Zephyr repository, and some substantial features are about to be merged. While this week might seem a bit more quiet than usual (which, in Zephyr terms, still means that 130+ pull requests got merged 😊) I expect next week to be packed with some really cool stuff.

Zephyr SDK gets updated to 0.16.1

A really big benefit of Zephyr is the fact that it comes with its own SDK or, in other terms, a pre-packaged version of the toolchains for all the architectures that Zephyr support, plus host tools such as OpenOCD, QEMU, etc. This can throw some people off as it feels like “downloading the earth” the first time you setup your Zephyr developer environment, but this is incredibly convenient on the long run. It also makes your life easier since you know you’re going to be basing your development off the exact same one that Zephyr maintainers all around the world (and our CI jobs) are using daily.

A minor update of the SDK (v0.16.1) has been made available by Stephanos this week. Check out the release notes and consider upgrading your SDK install if any of the addressed issues and added toolchains are relevant for you (if not, there’s probably no pressing need for you to update).

MCUmgr

I’ll probably come up with a blog post fully dedicated to MCUmgr in the future, as it’s one of those Zephyr capabilities that deserve to be more widely advertised. In a nutshell, it lets you perform all kinds of device management operations on your device, over-the-air (ex. BLE) or through serial or UDP connections.

With PR #54041, MCUmgr’s Simple Management Protocol (SMP) has been updated and commands can now return more detailed error responses for each command group.

Drivers

• Jailhouse is a static partitioning hypervisor that can be used to create and manage isolated environments, or “cells,” on a multi-core system. PR #55202 makes it possible for cells to communicate with one another using Ethernet over Inter-VM shared memory.
• The LSM6DSV16X sensor from STMicroelectronics is a high-performance, low-power 6-axis IMU, featuring a 3-axis digital accelerometer and a 3-axis digital gyroscope. #57688 added a driver for the sensor and, similar to the LSM6DSO16IS I covered last week, it is also possible to use the sensor as a sensor hub.
• There’s some cool stuff in the works around all things battery charging, and a related addition this week is the fact that fuel gauge drivers can now expose RemainingCapacityAlarm and RemainingTimeAlarm properties. (PR #57446)
• The MEC172x from Microchip is a Cortex-M4F based embedded microcontroller well-suited for e.g. keyboards or notebooks. It provides Hardware Root of Trust and has a hardware accelerator for cryptographic operations. #57511 added a driver for the chip’s crypto engine, and exposes APIs to use hash algorithms such as SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. A code sample has also been added.
• The driver for OnSemi’s MT9M114 camera sensor now supports YUV pixel format. Special thanks to @jeronimoagullo for their first accepted contribution to Zephyr! 🥳

Boards & SoCs

• NXP contributed support for the MIMXRT1062-FMURT6 board #57382
• A Bluetooth driver for the PSoC™ 6 BLE Prototyping Kit has been added with PR #57160.
• I2S support has been added for NXP RT595 board (#57620).

Miscellaneous

• Zephyr’s RTIO (real-time I/O) subsystem exposes a standard mechanism to enable complex, event-driven I/O handling by abstracting out some of the complexity inherent to DMA and interrupts. With PR #57823 the RTIO subsystem now provides an API for cancelling submission queue entries.
• PR #54761 adds support for block transfer in LWM2M.
• When using BLE Audio’s Basic Audio Profile, the Read Long procedure is now supported in both the unicast client and server. #54363

As always please feel free to jump in with your thoughts or questions in the comments below. See you next week!

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to be notified of upcoming publications! And of course, you can also always find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

Catch up on all the editions of the Zephyr Weekly Update:

Happy Friday! Another week, another round of new features, drivers, and more. Before jumping into the actual news, I want to mention that I will soon be launching a recurring series of Virtual Zephyr Talks. These will be video interviews and presentations with guests from the embedded and IoT community at large, where we will discuss best practices, tech news, and maybe more importantly answer all the questions you may have, live!

I encourage everyone to subscribe to the Zephyr YouTube channel, if you haven’t already, as this will allow you to not miss upcoming notifications and live streams when we go live with this in the next few weeks. Also, if you are reading this and feel like you would have something cool to show off during an upcoming episode, please shoot me a message!

AWS IoT Core Sample

Lucas Dietrich contributed a comprehensive code sample that demonstrates how to publish messages to AWS IoT Core from a Zephyr application using the MQTT protocol. It includes key concepts such as establishing a TLS 1.2 connection, subscribing to a topic, and of course publishing data.

“This sample can be used as a starting point for developers who are interested in building their own IoT solutions using Zephyr RTOS and AWS IoT Core.”

Lucas Dietrich

Head over to the sample documentation page to get all the info you need to run it on your own device! 🙂

New boards, shields & SOCs

• The PSoC™ 6 BLE Prototyping Board is a low-cost development board for designing and debugging solutions based on the PSoC 6 MCU from Infineon Technologies. As you can see in the picture, the PCB is split in two halves — you can just snap away the programmer and debugger module from the main board as you’re getting to the final stages of your prototyping phase!
  PR #56169 added the board definition to Zephyr, with lots of on-board features being supported out-of-the-box, including of course Bluetooth.

• NXP’s RT1040 EVK is now supported in Zephyr! This devkit comes with the i.MX RT1040 MCU (Cortex-M7, 600 MHz), 256MB of RAM, 64MB of QSPI Flash, Ethernet, a CAN transceiver, …
• The board definition for NXP i.MX8’s Audio DSP core has been updated (PR #57084) and now supports UART.
• The board definition for NXP MIMXRT1010-EVK evaluation kit now contains a description of its Arduino headers making it easier to use Arduino shields more transparently, i.e. you can simply mount the shield’s sensors and peripherals on arduino_i2c or arduino_spi and they will just work (PR #57433).
• Single-threading support has been added for the RISC-V architecture (PR #53346). When in single threaded mode, only the main thread is enabled and as such, Zephyr will look for a main() function to execute.
• GDMA (General Direct Memory Access) support has been added for ESP32S3 SoCs (PR #57495). GDMA is a feature that allows peripheral-to-memory, memory-to-peripheral, and memory-to-memory data transfer at a high speed. The CPU is not involved in the GDMA transfer, and therefore it becomes more efficient with less workload.

Drivers

I really enjoy keeping an eye on the changes on the sensor driver front, as it is a good opportunity to learn about potentially lesser known types of sensors, so I’m glad this week has been pretty active for all things drivers!

IMU Sensors

• The BMI323 from Bosch Sensortec is an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) that provide acceleration and angular rate measurement. It can be used for motion detection, fitness tracking, … Bjarki added support for it this week via PR #56594, and it features lots of Zephyr goodness.
  One thing that I particularly like is that the driver leverage’s Zephyr power management capabilities to allow the sensor to achieve the lowest possible power consumption until it’s effectively resumed.
• Another IMU sensor to join the hundreds of already supported ones is the LSM6DSO16IS from STMicroElectronics. The interesting thing with this one is its ISPU (Intelligent Sensor Processing Unit) which allows to run advanced signal processing and AI algorithms right on the sensor. The sensor can also act as a sensor hub for sensor fusion scenarios, and it can collect data from up to 4 external sensors attached to it.
  The new driver supports fetching accelerometer and gyroscope data, as well as fetching data from the “companion” sensors that may be connected to the hub.

Display

• Support has been added for the SSD1680 electronic paper display chip (commit #daf9030f).
• Related: the generic SSD16xx display driver has seen a significant improvement that now allows to get much better control on partial refreshes (PR #48163). Board and shields featuring e-ink displays have been updated to use the newly added refresh profiles.

ADC

• The recently added driver for Texas Instruments ADS114S0x ADC now allows access to the port expander (PR #55789).
• ADC driver has been added for the i.MX 6SoloX Processors (PR #40355).
• As part of ongoing housekeeping efforts, the ADC driver for STM32 has been updated to allow setting sampling time directly through the Devicetree (PR #57342).

Others

• OpenTitan is an open source silicon Root of Trust (RoT) project that uses the LowRISC RISC-V core. A driver for OpenTitan SPI host has been added (PR #54639).
• The driver for NOR Octo-SPI flash on STM32 has been improved to wait for the erase operation to complete before returning (PR #56472). This fixes potential issues when one would try to access the chip while a (typically long) erase operation was still in progress.
• An initial version of Infineon CAT1 flash driver has been contributed (PR #56667).

Wi-Fi

• One of the Wi-Fi power saving features consists in advertising a listening interval (“I will be sleeping–to save power–and only waking up every X beacon intervals. #kthxbai”). Thanks to PR #57116, the Wi-Fi API and shell commands make it possible to configure the “Listen Interval” power save mode
• It is now possible to access raw Wi-Fi scan data. The wifi scan shell command has also been updated to output the raw scan data should the feature be enabled (PR #57699).
• If you are using Wi-Fi on ESP32, you will be interested in learning that you can now use the wifi scan and wifi status shell commands, thanks to the fix in PR #57627.

USB

• The USB Battery Charging (BC) v1.2 specification defines limits and detection mechanisms for USB devices to draw current exceeding the USB 2.0 specification limit of 0.5A, 2.5W.
  Support for allowing BC1.2 peripherals to act as a charging device–a capability often provided on USB Type-C ports–has been added to Zephyr with PR #57101).
• USB Communications Device Class (CDC) Ethernet Control Model (ECM) class has been added to the new experimental USB device support.
  The USB CDC-ECM specification allows devices to use a USB interface to emulate an Ethernet network connection. In simpler terms, it allows a device to connect to a network (like the internet) through a USB connection instead of a traditional network cable. See PR #54448.

Miscellaneous

• Several notable Bluetooth bug fixes:
  • #56034 Bluetooth: Audio: CSIP set member register fix.
  • #57650 Bluetooth: Controller: Fix incorrect use of rx buffer in Tx ISR.

As always please feel free to jump in with your thoughts or questions in the comments below. See you next week!

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to be notified of upcoming publications! And of course, you can also always find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

Catch up on all the editions of the Zephyr Weekly Update:

As we’re entering a new month, I would like to start this week’s update with a quick look at some interesting metrics for the month of April, taken from the GitHub repository. And we are getting dangerously close to 500 boards supported upstream!

While I have your attention, I would also like to encourage you to take the Eclipse IoT Developer Survey and take some time to provide your input with regards to your embedded and IoT practices (which programming language or RTOS you use–hint, hint!–to hardware architectures, software supply chain management practices, etc).

And without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s noteworthy Zephyr contributions!

New boards, shields & SOCs

• XMC4700 relax kit board (#55435): Zephyr now supports the XMC4700 relax kit from Infineon. This evaluation board sports an XMC4700 micro-controller, based on an Arm Cortex-M4 @ 144MHz, with 2MB Flash and 352KB of RAM.
  This MCU is well-suited for applications that require motor control (ex: toys, power tools, industrial pumps, …) and for EV-charging scenarios.
• ARC HS4xD support (#56683): Support for the ARC HS4x processor family has been added, including the board definition for the HS4xD development kit. Since some of you, just like me until a few weeks ago, might not be familiar with ARC processors, I recommend you have a look at the dedicated Wikipedia entry.
• Many developer kits from ST Microelectronics feature a so-called Morpho connector. As opposed to the common “Arduino shield” type of connector, Morpho aims at exposing *all* the pins of the MCU, which can be really convenient to really make the most of the available peripherals.
  Thanks to Gerald and pull request #57468, ST Morpho connector nexus nodes are now supported and the pins mappings for Nucleo G431RB and Nucleo F302R8 boards have been contributed as examples.

• The xG24-PK6010A board from Silicon Labs is now supported (#56601).

Drivers

• NXP’s S32 family of microcontrollers are dedicated to automotive and industrial applications. As such, they support CAN XL, a variant of CAN that supports data rates up to 20MBit/s.
  With PR #52450, support has been added for NXP S32 CANEXCEL, and the board definition of the X-S32Z27X-DC has been updated accordingly.
• The ADS114S08 from Texas Instruments is a low-power/low-noise 16-bit ADC. And of course, you’ve guessed correctly: it’s now supported 🙂 (#54911).
• You might remember the Nordic nPM1300 Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) from previous weeks, and the associated nPM1300-EK evaluation kit. PR #56929 added a driver for the charging module. The code sample for the evaluation kit has been updated accordingly.

Shell improvements

The Zephyr shell is definitely one of my favorite features. Its extensibility and ease-of-use to quickly expose “helpers” that help monitoring and troubleshooting an application are super convenient, and it’s great to see it got some love this week.

The Zephyr shell has been enhanced to allow capturing and retrieving return values from executed commands, making it easier for developers to diagnose issues and understand the outcomes of shell commands. Just use the retval command to get the return code of the command that was executed last.

uart:~$ sensor info
device name: hts221@5f, vendor: STMicroelectronics, model: hts221, friendly name: (null)
device name: lis2mdl@1e, vendor: STMicroelectronics, model: lis2mdl, friendly name: (null)
device name: lps22hb-press@5c, vendor: STMicroelectronics, model: lps22hb-press, friendly name: (null)
device name: lsm6dsl@6a, vendor: STMicroelectronics, model: lsm6dsl, friendly name: (null)
uart:~$ helpp
helpp: command not found
uart:~$ retval
-8

Debugging and Testing updates

• As of version 0.12.0, OpenOCD supports Espressif’s USB JTAG Programmer. Therefore, there’s no need for a custom OpenOCD anymore if you want to debug for ESP-32. Very cool! The instructions for all the supported ESP32 devkits have been updated accordingly (#56935).
• When using the flash simulator, ex. when targeting QEMU or native posix, one can now use a memory region as the storage area. This allows the flash simulator to keep its contents over a device reboot (#57380). See an example here.
• Twister now (#57121) includes an option to shuffle tests across subsets, providing a more efficient and randomized testing environmentZephyr Weekly Update – May 5, 2023. This can help detect unwanted dependencies in test execution order, as well as distributing better tests among subsets (i.e. make sure tests that run longer are distributed more evenly).

Miscellaneous

• New flags for disabling Neighbor Discovery/Multicast Listener Discovery per network interface (#57377): New network interface flags have been added to disable Neighbor Discovery (ND) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) per network interface. This allows interfaces that do not support ND/MLD (like OpenThread) to coexist with other IPv6 interfaces.

As always please feel free to jump in with your thoughts or questions in the comments below. See you next week!

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to be notified of upcoming publications! And of course, you can also always find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

Catch up on all the editions of the Zephyr Weekly Update: