Category: Zephyr

Happy New Year, everyone! 🎆 Before jumping into everything that happened in Zephyr land over the holiday break, I want to remind everyone that the deadline to submit a talk to Zephyr Developer Summit 2024 will be approaching really fast. You have until Sunday, January 14 to propose a talk, so don’t wait too long!

Working towards a new model for describing boards and SoCs

As Zephyr starts supporting more and more architectures, flavours of SoCs, and actual boards ; and as said boards become increasingly rich (e.g. it’s pretty common to find multiple SoCs on a single “board”), the way things are being described in the current Zephyr implementation is starting to show its limits. After several months of discussions and prototyping, a new way to describe SoCs and boards is being proposed.

I am really looking forward to how the new model will make adding a new SoC/board to Zephyr much easier (i.e. less files to touch), and how this will also enable better tooling, in particular from a documentation point of view (ex. quickly get a list of all the supported boards for a given SoC).

A new collaboration branch, collab-hwm, has been added to the Git repository, and you are invited to test things out and provide feedback. “v2” boards and SoCs are co-existing for now, but the goal will be that all existing ones eventually migrate to the new model.

Refreshing our Code of Conduct

It is worth mentioning that an update has recently been made to the project’s Code of Conduct.

Zephyr is using the Contributor Covenant as a template for its code of conduct, and the version we were using was several years old, and the recent update provides, among other things, improved guidelines regarding what may be the consequences for actions deemed in violation of the Code of Conduct.

Boards & SoCs

• The Adafruit QT PY RP2040 is a tiny board featuring a—you guessed it—RP2040 SoC, alongside an RGB NeoPixel, a USB connector, as well as a STEMMA QT connector. It is now supported in Zephyr thanks to PR #66603 and a first contribution from Ian Wakely (@raveious).

• Another Rasperry Pi Pico based board, the WIZnet’s W5500-EVB-Pico, was also introduced by Ian (PR #66523). It is basically your typical Raspberry Pi Pico, except that it’s coupled with the W5500 Ethernet MAC/PHY.
• Added support for Intel Raptor Lake CRB board (PR #66696).
• Added support for ST STM32H750B Discovery Kit (Arm Cortex-M7, 128K Flash, 1M SRAM). (PR #66280)

SoC driver updates

• ADC support has been added for Nuvoton numaker. (PR #66642)
• hwinfo driver added for Smartbond platforms, enabling access to the reset cause using the standard hwinfo_get_reset_cause() Zephyr API. (PR #64125)
• On ESP32, the Bluetooth driver now exposes the close() API, making it possible to properly close/disable the Bluetooth controller. (PR #66693)
• New clock controller driver for Raspberry Pi Pico. (PR #62186)
• BLE support using HCI has been added to ST STM32WBA SoC series (PR #66181). Worth noting that for now BLE is only compatible with the nucleo_wba55cg board.
• Added Ambiq HCI driver for Apollo4 Blue Plus. (PR #66227)
• Added support interrupt-driven UART mode for Renesas RA series. (PR #65775)

General drivers

• Initial support has been added for the popular DWC2 USB 2.0 controller. (PR #64943)
• New generic retained memory driver for retained registers (see zephyr,retained-reg compatible and PR #66992).
• New Cadence SDHC driver (PR #64036)

Input subsystem

• When running on the native simulator target, it is now possible to tap into the events generated by an evdev device on the host, and have them be automatically injected in your app as regular Zephyr input events.
  The documentation of the new zephyr,native-linux-evdev binding shows how simple it is to add one or more “evdev” nodes in your Devicetree, and later map them to actual evdev devices (as found in your /dev/input/ directory) when you run the application. (PR #66353)
• GPIO keys driver now properly supports power management. When suspended, all the button GPIOs and interrupts are disabled. (PR #66582)

Miscellaneous

• In order to automatically compute the minimal heap size that is (theoretically) needed for a given application to work, a new mechanism allows each subsystem to indicate how much heap size they need.
  The sum of each specified heap size requirement is then computed at build time (K_HEAP_MEM_POOL_SIZE), and used to actually set the size of the heap memory pool.
  The legacy CONFIG_HEAP_MEM_POOL_SIZE Kconfig may still be used but if it happens to be less than the computed K_HEAP_MEM_POOL_SIZE, the latter will be used and a build warning will inform you that the heap size you were trying to set manually is (theoretically at least) too small. If you know what you’re doing and want to force a manual override, you may set the Kconfig CONFIG_HEAP_MEM_POOL_IGNORE_MIN.
• New GDB stub available for AArch32 (only tested/available on Cortex-A for now). (PR #58067)
• Bluetooth Common Audio Profile (CAP) Commander discovery function has been implemented. (PR #64852)
• Bluetooth Mesh publications are now randomly delayed to better follow a recommendation in the specification. (PR ##66498)
• When using the net stats shell command to get statistics about an Ethernet interface, more details are now being output. (PR #66680)
• New available POSIX APIs:
  • pthread_getguardsize()
  • pthread_setguardsize()

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A big thank you to the 19 individuals who had their first pull request accepted since the last post, 💙 🙌: @tlissows, @raveious, @jrsa, @manuel-loew-infineon, @moonlight83340, @TomChang19, @gdb3-ampaworks, @TomasGalbickaNXP, @gumulka, @Manu3l0us, @Songjf-ttk, @rvoell-gcx, @Ryanjwoodward, @tomi-font, @Marquichou, @roymurlidhar, @javlands, @WilliamLeara, and @michal-smola.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

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 previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update:

As a lot of folks are wrapping up for the holiday season, the Zephyr community hasn’t slowed down all that much last week and there were quite a few noteworthy additions that this blog post will be covering, including a pretty cool (albeit short!) demo video.

Improved documentation search experience

One of the top complaints I’ve heard ever since I became the documentation manager for the Zephyr Project is how it can sometimes be hard to find information in the project’s documentation. It’s certainly true that the search engine historically available on docs.zephyrproject.org isn’t always giving the most helpful results.

As of last week, a new search experience is available with Google Programmable Search now being the default search engine when browsing the Zephyr documentation.

The new engine is faster, much more tolerant to typos, and allows you to write advanced search queries that are more than just a couple keywords (ex. you may use double-quotes to keep words together, exclude keywords by using the minus sign, etc.).

Meta-categories such as “Code Samples”, “API reference”, etc. are also available for you to narrow down the list of search results to only the category of results you care about (if you feel a category is missing, btw, let me know!). See for example the screenshot below, with top 3 results to the query “toggle a GPIO” — they are exactly what you’d expect them to be, but should you want more concrete examples of how to toggle a GPIO, clicking the “Samples” tab (or the green label in the search results) will give you just that!

💡 Pro Tip: Press / to quickly focus on the search box while navigating the documentation.

Capacitive touch sensor for ESP32

Capacitive touch sensors are a kind of specialized GPIO with dedicated circuitry that detects an approaching finger by measuring a variation in the capacitance of the circuit.

Espressif devices typically include support for capacitive touch, and PR #64931 just made it possible to access this feature in Zephyr! The new driver is a standard input driver and as such fits nicely in the now pretty rich input subsystem.

The dedicated Devicetree binding, espressif,esp32-touch exposes a variety of settings to adjust the sensitivity, configure the debouncing, etc.

Here is, for example, the full Devicetree overlay to enable touch detection on pin TCH8 of my M5Stack AtomS3:

#include <zephyr/dt-bindings/input/input-event-codes.h>
#include <zephyr/dt-bindings/input/esp32-touch-sensor-input.h>

&touch {
	debounce-interval-ms = <30>;
	href-microvolt = <2700000>;
	lref-microvolt = <500000>;
	href-atten-microvolt = <1000000>;
	filter-mode = <ESP32_TOUCH_FILTER_MODE_IIR_16>;
	filter-debounce-cnt = <1>;
	filter-noise-thr = <ESP32_TOUCH_FILTER_NOISE_THR_4_8TH>;
	filter-jitter-step = <4>;
	filter-smooth-level = <ESP32_TOUCH_FILTER_SMOOTH_MODE_IIR_2>;

	status = "okay";

	touch_sensor_set: touch_sensor_0 {
		channel-num = <8>;
		channel-sens = <50>;
		zephyr,code = <INPUT_KEY_0>;
	};

};

And below is the code sample in action. If you’re not familiar with capacitive touch and a bit confused looking at the video, yes, this is indeed literally a single wire that’s being used as the input!

Funnily enough, it took me about 30 seconds to get the sample to work, and probably 10 times more to videotape it! 😝

Boards & SoCs

• Beagleboard BeagleV-Fire is a single board computer (SBC) built around Microchip’s PolarFire MPFS025T SoC FPGA. In addition to providing an FPGA with 23K logic elements, it features a 5-core RISC-V 64-bit processor. (PR #66389)
• nRF9151-DK, an upcoming developer kit from Nordic Semiconductor and targeting DECT NR+ and LTE-M/NB-IoT with GNSS, is already supported in Zephyr 🙃. (PR #66110)
• The PAN1783A Evaluation Board from Panasonic is now supported. (PR #64259)
• The Ambiq Apollo4P evaluation board is built around Ambiq’s ultra-low power Apollo4 Plus SoC, which is a Cortex M4F @ 192 MHz. (PR #66328)
• ST Nucleo F722ZE is now supported. (PR #66050)

Drivers

• Expanding on the recently added modem subsystem, a new API has been added to interact with cellular modems in a consistent way across all available technologies (GSM, GPRS, LTE, etc.). Think retrieving signal strength information, for example.
  Check out the documentation here and how the new API is now used in the cellular modem code sample. (PR #65685)
• Ultrachip UC8175 support has been added. (PR #61439)
• The Charger API now includes a sbs_charger_charge_enable() standard API that can be use to initiate/terminate a charging cycle. (PR #66128)
• STM32 MCUs can now use SMBus thanks to the newly added driver. (PR #66260)
• New driver added for ST LIS2DU12 accelerometer. (PR #65734)

Miscellaneous

• The Bluetooth Gaming Audio Profile aims at enabling configuration of low-level audio services and profiles specifically for gaming use cases (ex. bidirectional voice for online chat, high bitrate for HQ game audio, etc.).
  PR #57032 is the oldest pull request merged this week (dating back to April of this year) and it introduces support for the Bluetooth Gaming Audio Profile in Zephyr.
• Initial support for USB Audio Class 2 has been added. The idea will be to allow developers to use the zephyr,uac2 binding to describe an USB Audio Class 2 device by utilizing the Devicetree vs. manually written code.
• A new API allows to configure CoAP retransmission settings. (PR #66025)
• Support for TCP Keep-Alive has been introduced and can be enabled using Kconfig option NET_TCP_KEEPALIVE. (PR #66316)
• The unused and obsolete arm_core_tz.c Arm TrustZone driver has been removed. (PR #66224)
• Improvements have been made to the Device Power Management framework to not unnecessarily resume/suspend in some situations. (PR #66246)
• If you’ve started to look into the new keyboard matrix driver, you will likely find the new input kbd_matrix_state_dump shell command quite useful. As its name indicates, given the id of a keyboard matrix Devicetree node, it will dump the state of the keyboard matrix every time a key is pressed/released.
• The documentation of the pytest plugin has been vastly improved, and so has the API reference for the Sockets API.

With the holiday season upon us, I will be back with the next update on January 5th. Hopefully I won’t be buried under thousands of pull requests to write about, but should that be the case I will do my best to highlight the most noteworthy ones!

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A big thank you to the 12 individuals who had their first pull request accepted this week, 💙 🙌: @ryukoposting, @hellesvik-nordic, @sebastianschlupp, @kevinior, @aofrioWeifengLi, @VuDangBP, @BryanZhuAM, @AlessioLei94, @alelec13, @helen741, @Burt-Silverman, and @sateeshkotapati.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

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 previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update:

Happy Friday, folks! Once is not custom, let’s dive right into this week’s updates from Zephyr RTOS land, although don’t forget to submit a talk to FOSDEM 2024 before midnight!

New emulated DMA driver

It is nice to see an increasing amount of emulated drivers added to Zephyr recently.

This week, a new zephyr,dma-emul binding was introduced. The associated driver provides a software implementation of a DMA controller that can be used to enable testing of areas and drivers otherwise difficult to test for they rely on DMA to be present.

See PR #58375 for more details.

Support for LVGL keypad input binding

Until PR #65002 being merged earlier this week, the LVGL keypad input device interface was the only input interface not yet supported in Zephyr (pointers, encoders, and buttons were already supported).

The new zephyr,lvgl-keypad-input binding allows to declare a new LVGL input device in your Devicetree that maps input codes (ex. INPUT_KEY_DOWN) coming from a Zephyr input device, to LVGL ones (ex. LV_KEY_NEXT).

The LVGL sample has been updated to support keypads, and is therefore now a neat showcase for all four LVGL input interfaces!

Networking

• Added support for setting multicast IPv4 TTL and IPv6 hop limit. (PR #65886)
• It is now possible to perform multicast join/leave operations through the standard BSD Sockets API. (PR #66018)
• A new fallback mechanism has been added to LwM2M subsystem.
  It is very common for a LwM2M client to have a list of several bootstrap server it may be trying to connecting to, so it only makes sense for the subsystem to support that and automatically try another bootstrap server from the configured list should connecting to the main one fail. Similarly, the fallback mechanism can be used for the connection to the actual LwM2M server, to switch to another one in case of lost connection. (PR #65745)
• The CoAP server now implements network management events. These can be quite convenient to be notified when e.g. a new observer is added/removed, or when the server start/stops.

Boards & SoCs

• Adafruit Grand Central M4 Express is a devkit based on the Microchip ATSAMD51, with 1MB flash, 256 KB RAM, and a whooping 70 GPIO pins in total! (PR #62618)
• STM32WBA55 SoC series is now supported, alongside the ST Nucleo WBA55CG board. Featuring both Arduino and STMorpho headers, and based on a Cortex-M33, this devkit aims at ultra low-power BLE applications. (PR #66073)

Drivers

• The keyboard matrix driver keeps getting nice improvements. It now supports polling and scan mode, to help in situations where one is not able to use interrupts for the GPIOs corresponding to the rows/columns.
  For example, large keyboard matrices might typically be accessed through a GPIO multiplexer that allows you to only “talk” to one row or column at a time.
  I am really looking forward to putting this new feature to use to add support for the M5Stack Cardputer and its cool keyboard 🙂
• Several fixes to Sierra Wireless HL7800 modem driver for better low-power support. (PR #66237)
• Added support for NTCG103JF103FT1 thermistor. (PR #62185)
• Quadrature decoder support has been added for NXP S32 series. (PR #65035)
• Added support for the ST LPS28DFW pressure sensor. (PR #65416).

Miscellaneous

• When using SNTP (Simple network time protocol), a new CONFIG_SNTP_UNCERTAINTY allows to get a more reliable timestamp. (PR #66233)
• When using Bluetooth Mesh, advertising is automatically suspended/resumed when enabling disabling Mesh. (PR #64721)
• OpenThread version has been updated, with added support for BLE TCAT (commissionning over BLE). (PR #66160)
• New POSIX API:
  • pthread_sigmask()

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A big thank you to the 7 individuals who had their first pull request accepted this week, 💙 🙌: @rabarar, @pillo79, @lukas-jung, @mikevoyt, @naNEQ, @jrhrsmit, and @TangleZ.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

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 previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update: