Benjamin Cabé

This has been a very busy week for the community, with an above average amount of new drivers and boards getting merged. Speaking of recently added boards, I am very excited to include one, the super tiny M5Stack AtomS3, in my Zephyr Tech Talk presentation next Wednesday! 🙂

I hope many of you will join, as I will be covering how I ended up migrating my now pretty old, and frankly quite hackish, Artificial Nose project to Zephyr in a matter of hours. I used this opportunity to deep more into some Zephyr features that I hadn’t add a chance to touch before, like Zbus, and I can’t wait to share my experience with y’all.

You should register to make sure you don’t miss the live stream, and of course feel free to also share the event with your network!

Support for C11 threads

The C11 standard introduced a native multi-threading API that aims at establishing a portable API for all things threads.

POSIX is of course a very popular programming model for manipulating threads, but being part of the language itself, the API introduced in the 2011 version of the C standard is effectively (or should be at least!) supported on *any* platform that supports the C11 standard.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <threads.h>

// Thread function
int printHelloWorld(void *arg) {
    printf("Hello, World!\n");
    return 0;
}

int main() {
    thrd_t thread;

    // Create a new thread
    if (thrd_create(&thread, printHelloWorld, NULL) != thrd_success) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Error creating thread\n");
        return 1;
    }

    // Wait for the created thread to terminate
    thrd_join(thread, NULL);

    return 0;
}

Chris Friedt has been working on bringing C11 threads support to Zephyr and this materialized this week with PR #60759 being merged. Quite interestingly, since Zephyr already exposes a POSIX API, most of the threads.h APIs end up mapping mostly 1-to-1 to POSIX functions.

Logging to multiple UARTs

A new zephyr,log-uart chosen node can be used to indicate that log outputs may be sent to multiple UARTs.

Until now, the UART log backend would have been only logging to the zephyr,console chosen node, but with PR #64917 it’s now possible to have the following kind of node in your Devicetree to indicate the various UARTs where you’d like logs to show up:

/ {
	chosen {
		zephyr,log-uart = &log_uarts;
	};

	log_uarts: log_uarts {
		compatible = "zephyr,log-uart";
		uarts = <&uart0 &uart1>;
	};

    ...
};

New keyboard matrix GPIO driver

A new type of driver has been introduced to allow modeling a keyboard matrix out of any set of GPIOs. The gpio-kbd-matrix binding allows you to define your keyboard matrix configuration such as:

  kbd-matrix {
          compatible = "gpio-kbd-matrix";
          row-gpios = <&gpio0 0 (GPIO_PULL_UP | GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW)>,
                      <&gpio0 1 (GPIO_PULL_UP | GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW)>;
          col-gpios = <&gpio0 2 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>,
                      <&gpio0 3 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>,
                      <&gpio0 4 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
          no-ghostkey-check;
  };

More details in PR #65117.

Boards & SoCs

• The nRF9131 Evaluation Kit from Nordic is a single-board evaluation kit for the nRF9131 SiP for LTE-M and NB-IoT.

• The M5Stack AtomS3 is a *very* tiny ESP32-S3 based developer kit that manages to fit a small 0.85″ LCD display on what is effectively a 1×1″ (24×24mm) piece of electronics!
  Since it also has an on-board accelerometer, it can run the LVGL Accelerometer Chart code sample out-of-the-box!

• The Renesas Starter Kit+ for RZ/T2M is an evaluation and development kit for the RZ/T2M MPU. (PR #64566)
• Support has been added for the Verdin iMX8M Plus Computer on Module (CoM) from Toradex. (PR #61713)
• UP Squared Pro 7000 is now supported. It is the 3rd generation of palm-sized developer board of UP Boards series and it is powered by an Intel Alder Lake N (Intel N-series Platform) SoC. (PR #65019)
• Support has been added for the STM32H7B0 SoC series. (PR #65092)

Drivers

• New driver for the Linear Technologies LTC2451 ADC, an ultra-tiny 16-bit ADC. (PR #64390)
• New driver for Renesas HS3001 and HS3003 temperature/humidity sensors (PR #63016)
• A charger driver has been added to the already existing regulator driver for the MAX20335 multi-function device. (PR #64971)
• The LPS22DF altimeter / pressure sensor is now supported. It is an ultracompact, piezoresistive, absolute pressure sensor that can be used as a digital output barometer, with an output data rate up to 200 Hz (PR #62028)
• The NXP LPC DMA driver now supports hardware triggering. (PR #64573)
• New driver for NXP FlexRAM memory controller. FlexRAM is a highly configurable and flexible RAM memory array, found on e.g. RT10XX and RT11XX series. (PR #62788)
• New modem driver for Quectel EG25-G. (PR #64746)
• New driver for ExplorIR-M CO2 sensor. A new co2_polling code samples was also introduced to make it easy to try things out with this driver (or any other CO2 driver really!). (PR #64621)
• A new CAN shell command (can timing) adds support for setting raw timing values. (PR #65054)

Miscellaneous

• The inter-core messaging (ICMsg) backend now supports the transfer of dynamically allocated buffers. (PR #58741)
• Added API to BLE Audio CAP to set codec capabilities. (PR #63223)
• Zephyr native simulator is now the recommended target for running Zephyr in your desktop/POSIX environment, and the documentation has been updated to reflect that.
• The UART Shell backend has been reworked to support the asynchronous UART API. (PR #63967)
• A new set of shell commands (cred ...) allow to interactively set TLS network credentials. See the list of commands here. (PR #64343)
• MCUmgr OS management group now has functions for getting/setting the current time to/from the rtc alias device. (PR #64934)
• The Bluetooth “broadcast audio source” code sample now supports using e.g. your host computer as the audio source.
  Granted that you are running the sample on a device that has a USB Device stack and Audio support, enabling CONFIG_USE_USB_AUDIO_INPUT will make your device show up as a sound device when plugged to your computer, and any audio that you will send to this “virtual speaker”, will be broadcast over LE Audio! 🔊

A big thank you to the 11 individuals who had their first pull request accepted this week, 💙 🙌: @TimTTP, @GabrielHAFs, @LipinskiPNordicSemi, @michael-whg, @josuah, @CkovMk, @CharlesDias, @ndaneil, @xvigo, @KamilxPaszkiet, and @mpenate-ellenbytech.

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:

Hi everyone! In case you missed it, the Eclipse Foundation just released the results of their 2023 IoT Developer Survey. It is always a challenge to understand the trends in adoption of open source software as there is no obligation on the adopters’ side to tell when and where they are using open source projects 🙂

This survey is very helpful in shedding some light on the technology stacks people are using in their IoT solutions, and it’s nice to see Zephyr is on their radar.

In other news, here are some of the things that have kept the Zephyr community busy this week!

CoAP “servlets”

When building an IoT device, one typically wants to spend time writing their actual application logic, not reinventing the wheel regarding how they should implement the “Internet” aspect of their “Thing”

A merged pull request from this week, PR #64265, is introducing a CoAP server API that allows to easily register CoAP resources against a CoAP “service”, effectively getting rid of most of the boilerplate one would have to come up with if building on lower layer APIs.

In a nutshell, and in a slightly simplified way, a minimal CoAP server + /hello resource would not require much more code than:

COAP_SERVICE_DEFINE(coap_server, 
			"0.0.0.0",
			&coap_port, 
			COAP_SERVICE_AUTOSTART);

static int my_get(struct coap_resource *resource, struct coap_packet *request,
                  struct sockaddr *addr, socklen_t addr_len)
{
    static const char *msg = "Hello, world!";
    uint8_t data[CONFIG_COAP_SERVER_MESSAGE_SIZE];
    struct coap_packet response;
    
    /** ... **/
    
    coap_packet_append_payload(&response, (uint8_t *)msg, sizeof(msg));

    return coap_resource_send(resource, &response, addr, addr_len);
}


static const char * const my_resource_path[] = { "hello", NULL };
COAP_RESOURCE_DEFINE(my_resource, coap_server, {
    .path = my_resource_path,
    .get = my_get
});

The CoAP service can then be started/stopped using coap_service_start()/coap_service_stop() (in the example above it’s set to start automatically) or using shell commands, and things like the magic ./well-known/core endpoint, retransmissions, etc. are automatically taken care of by the service.

I love it when Zephyr gets new features like this. This new service feels very much like what you would expect to find in a full-blown operating system, and yet we’re still talking about super constrained devices here.

You should definitely check out the code sample to get more familiar with this new API.

Boards & SoCs

• Arm Cortex-A and Cortex-R now support SMP! It is worth noting that FPU_SHARING and USERSPACE are not supported yet. (PR #61206)
• It is now possible to have a custom interrupt control interface implementation on Cortex-M, using the CONFIG_ARM_CUSTOM_INTERRUPT_CONTROLLER option.
  While all Cortex-M platforms have an NVIC controller,custom SoCs may have additional IRQ controllers, or require custom handling. This option allows to indicate that these SoCs are using custom interrupt control interface implementation
• The Firefly ROC-RK3568 mini computer is an ARM64 board with a quad-core Cortex-A55 @ 2GHz, 4GB of LPDDR, 32GB of eMMC, M.2 PCI Express slots, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and more. It is now supported in Zephyr! (PR #64217)

• Support has been added for the Lolin S2 Mini (also known as Wemos S2 Mini …and I am realizing as I am typing this that I have one sitting on my desk, and one connected to my electricity meter monitoring the consumption of my house! Guess I need to do some hacking and porting soon!). This small devkit features an ESP32-S2 with 4MB of Flash, 2MB of PSRAM, and can be used with a variety of shields.
• On STM32, the ADC driver now supports power management. A code sample has been added to demonstrate the improvements (spoiler alert: consumption can be almost 20x less now). (PR #64191)
• Clock control driver is now available for Ambiq SoCs. (PR #63097)
• Added support for NXP Multirate Timer peripheral. (PR #64801)

Drivers

• A new Wi-Fi driver is available for the Infineon AIROC, as found in CYW4343W, CYW4373, CYW43012, CYW43012, CYW43439. It is pretty exciting since among other things, it means we should soon see Wi-Fi support added to the Rasperry Pi Pico W. (PR #63721)
  • The already supported CY8CPROTO-062-4343W board now has Wi-Fi functionality enabled.
• The aforementioned Wi-Fi module supports both SPI and SDIO interfaces, and it’s the latter that’s used by the driver for now.
  SDIO is an extension of the SD specification covering I/O functions, and it turns out support for it was also just added to Zephyr. (PR #56869)
• The Analog AD5592 is a versatile multifunction IC that has 8 I/O pins that can be independently configured to act as DAC output, ADC inputs, or regular GPIOs.
  A new “multi-function” driver is now available to leverage all these different options easily from the Devicetree. (PR #64592)
• New Ethernet driver for Microchip LAN8651. (PR #63614)
• New driver for the TSL2561 light sensor. (PR #56869)

Miscellaneous

• A new spinlock mechanism, ticket spinlocks, has been introduced. It is meant to help in situations where traditional locking would be “unfair” across multiple CPUs due to how the implementation only relies on a single atomic variable. Ticket spinlocks provide true FIFO ordering at the cost of slightly increased memory footprint. (PR #61541)
• Some awesome work to implement the official LwM2M interoperability tests, in particular the ones related to bootstrapping, registration, device management and service enablement interface, and information reporting interface. I highly encourage you to have a look as this is also a great way to get up to speed with using Pytest for Zephyr testing 🙂 (PR #64013)
  
  I wonder if the Open Mobile Alliance still organizes PlugFests, but I would live to see Zephyr participate in the future.
• CMSIS version has been updated to 5.9.0 in the Zephyr manifest. (PR #64851)
• API for Bluetooth CAP Commander has been introduced. (PR #64645)

A big thank you to the 7 individuals who had their first pull request accepted this week, 💙 🙌: @cocoeoli, @mgolu, @topisani, @samueltardieu, @p9n, @BenjaminDeuter, and @raffi-g.

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! Zephyr now supports GNSS modems, and this is definitely one of the main highlights of this week. I can’t wait to see what kind of applications people will build now that there is a standard, out-of-the-box, way to feed location/navigation info into Zephyr applications.

GNSS Support

The recently introduced modem subsystem added a chat module that allows to pretty much “script” the interactions with a modem.

In the context of cellular modems, it would typically mean dealing with AT commands. This week, a new massive pull request was merged that adds support for GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) modems. And, guess what, it too builds on top of the modem subsytem and chat module in particular.

The NMEA 0183 specification standardizes the way GNSS devices output data. Whether it is actual location data, information about the satellites in sight, date/time, … there is a well-defined ASCII representation for it. Below is an example of what you would see if you were to listen to the UART of a GNSS modem:

$GPGSV,8,1,25,21,44,141,47,15,14,049,44,6,31,255,46,3,25,280,44*75

$GPGSV,8,2,25,18,61,057,48,22,68,320,52,27,34,268,47,24,32,076,45*76

$GPGSV,8,3,25,14,51,214,49,19,23,308,46*7E

$GPGSV,8,4,25,51,44,183,49,46,41,169,43,48,36,220,45*47

$GLGSV,8,5,25,82,49,219,52,76,22,051,41,83,37,316,51,67,57,010,51*6C

$GLGSV,8,6,25,77,24,108,44,81,10,181,46,78,1,152,34,66,18,060,45*50

$GLGSV,8,7,25,68,37,284,50*5C

$GBGSV,8,8,25,111,35,221,47,112,4,179,39,114,48,290,48*11

The chat module is therefore a perfect fit to easily hook up the appropriate parsers for each type of NMEA 0183 frame a GNSS module may spit out.

One thing that I really like with this new feature, is that it’s providing much more than the raw infrastructure to “talk” to the GNSS modem. It can effectively–and optionally, should you be too resource-constrained!–parse all the collected data into proper data structures that you can use in your code.

/** GNSS info data structure */
struct gnss_info {
	/** Number of satellites being tracked */
	uint16_t satellites_cnt;
	/** Horizontal dilution of precision in 1/1000 */
	uint16_t hdop;
	/** The fix status */
	enum gnss_fix_status fix_status;
	/** The fix quality */
	enum gnss_fix_quality fix_quality;
};

/** GNSS time data structure */
struct gnss_time {
	/** Hour [0, 23] */
	uint8_t hour;
	/** Minute [0, 59] */
	uint8_t minute;
	/** Millisecond [0, 59999] */
	uint16_t millisecond;
	/** Day of month [1, 31] */
	uint8_t month_day;
	/** Month [1, 12] */
	uint8_t month;
	/** Year [0, 99] */
	uint8_t century_year;
};


/** Navigation data structure */
struct navigation_data {
	/** Latitudal position in nanodegrees (0 to +-180E9) */
	int64_t latitude;
	/** Longitudal position in nanodegrees (0 to +-180E9) */
	int64_t longitude;
	/** Bearing angle in millidegrees (0 to 360E3) */
	uint32_t bearing;
	/** Speed in millimeters per second */
	uint32_t speed;
	/** Altitude in millimeters */
	int32_t altitude;
};

See PR #61073, documentation page, and code sample for more details on this very neat new feature 🙂

Boards & SoCs

It is hard to believe that the first release of the Arduino Uno dates back to 2010! In June of this year, Arduino released the fourth release of the Uno, the Arduino Uno R4.

Where the original Uno was using an 8-bit AVR ATmega328P microcontroller with 32 KB of Flash and a whopping 2 KB of RAM, the Uno R4 is using a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 from Renesas (RA4M1) running at 48 MHz, with 256KB of Flash and 32 KB of RAM.

This week, PR #60760 was merged, adding support for the Arduino Uno R4 Minima in Zephyr.

Other boards added this week include:

• The SensorTile.box PRO is to ST Microelectronics what Thingy is to Nordic: a feature-packed devkit built around an impressive amount of sensors: temperature, IMUs, humidity, microphone, etc. It is a great starting point for a wide variety of applications, from wearables to environment sensing. It’s nice to see a dedicated code sample to directly exercise all the sensors. (PR #64039)
• STM32L4R9I-DISCO Discovery kit, which features a Cortex-M4, 640Kb of RAM and 2Mb of Flash, as well as a round 390×390 pixels OLED panel with touch interface. (PR #64514)

Drivers

• Telit ME910G1 Cat M1/NB2 modem is now supported thanks to a first contribution from Jeff Welder! (PR #63711)
• Maxim MAX20335 PMIC is now supported. This PMIC targets low-power wearable applications. (PR #64555)
• New watchdog driver for Infineon XMC4xxx (PR #62954)
• A new GPIO monitor driver is available. It allows to link the on/off status of a power domain to the state of a GPIO (PR #61166)

Miscellaneous

• New shell commands have been added to start, stop and set properties of an Audio Codec device. (PR #57580)
• Regulator API now allows to access the list of current limits supported by a given regulator. It’s also made available through the newly added regulator clist command. (PR #64516)

uart:~$ regulator clist BUCK1
50.000 mA
75.000 mA
100.000 mA
0.125 A
0.150 A
0.175 A
0.200 A
0.225 A
0.250 A
0.275 A
0.300 A
0.325 A
0.350 A
0.375 A

• Ongoing work to refactor keyboard scanning drivers so that common code and configuration can be better shared. (PR #64456)

A big thank you to the 10 individuals who had their first pull request accepted this week, 💙 🙌: @Ayush1325, @LuckeTech, @majunkier, @TomKeddie, @ddeshat, @yangnin, @jeffwelder-ellenbytech, @jrversteegh, @pin-zephyr, and @gbarkadiusz.

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: