Zephyr Project Meetup: Winterthur, Switzerland | ZHAW Institute of Embedded Systems InES

The Zephyr Project Meetup welcomed an impressive 111 attendees, creating a lively and engaging environment throughout the evening. Thank you to everyone who joined. It was a pleasure to see you all. A special thank you goes to our speakers, who did a fantastic job.

Program

5:00 pm – 5:30 pm – Welcome snacks & drinks

5:30 pm – 5:50 pm – Welcome note & lightning talk on Zephyr in Education and Research, Prof. Andreas Rüst, Head of Institute of Embedded Systems

5:50 pm – 6:10 pm – Rust with Zephyr: An Overview: Dr. Andreas Nussberger, Noser Engineering

Overview of current Rust support in Zephyr with a focus on tooling and supported Zephyr features. The talk includes an introduction to the Rust ecosystem and its integration into the Zephyr world, a kickstart guide on how to start a Rust application with Zephyr and an overview of the available Zephyr features accessible from within Rust.

6:10 pm – 6:30 pm – Zephyr Optimisations: through the looking ~glass~ code: Loic Domaigne, Doulos GmbH

What's running on the target is not what you see in the code. In this talk, we'll explain and demonstrate some of the optimisation tricks used by Zephyr to speed up execution and reduce code footprint. We'll look at:
- autoconf.h and conditional compilation.
- Devicetree macro, the good part.
- Do I really need five levels of indirection to blink an LED?
- SysV voodoo.

6:30 – 6:45 pm – Real-Time Isn't Optional: How Zephyr Guarantees Safety at Racing Speeds: Jil Zerndt, Zurich UAS Racing

Imagine: A CAN bus error occurs while your Formula Student race car accelerates at full throttle. You have less than one millisecond to detect the fault and open the shutdown circuit. This isn't hypothetical—this is competition day, and your firmware needs to get it right.
ZHAW Formula Student Team, Zurich UAS Racing, redesigned their Vehicle Control Unit using Zephyr RTOS 4.2.1 to meet these safety requirements for a race car controlling four 35kW motors across six CAN buses. This talk presents our architecture, the real-time guarantees we achieved, and practical insights from building a safety-critical system on an open-source RTOS.

6:45 pm – 7:15 pm – Break time – Pizza, Board giveaways

7:15 pm – 7:35 pm – How to Out Of Tree a Trusted-Firmware-M (TF-M) board for the STM32U5Axx MCU: Gerson Budke, Leica Geosystems AG

Provide a reference about how to design a Trusted-Firmware-M (TF-M) board out-of-tree. The talk will present how users can customise their own board in a way that can be easily reused in a company. It provides insight into how to set up security credentials and how this is embedded in secure memory.

7:35 pm – 7:55 pm – Replacing CAN: How Single-Pair Ethernet and TSN Enable the Next Generation of Embedded Systems: Kilian Brunner, ZHAW

As embedded systems outgrow CAN, Single-Pair Ethernet and TSN offer a deterministic upgrade. This session highlights practical lessons from integrating 10BASE-T1L daisy-chaining and IEEE 802.1AS into Zephyr, focusing on switch-port abstraction.

7:55 pm – 8:15 pm – Audio-over-Ethernet using Zephyr: Peter Büchler, Noser Engineering

From touch UI and device drivers to precise PTP time synchronisation - A practical insight of a demonstrator for AES67 multicast audio streaming implemented in a short time on an STM32H7 microcontroller.

8:15 pm onwards – Networking, Board giveaways

About the Venue and Board Sponsors

This meetup took place at the ZHAW School of Engineering, located at Technikumstrasse 71, Winterthur. The event was co-hosted by Noser Engineering and ZHAW Institute of Embedded Systems.

Many thanks to STMicroelectronics, NXP and Microchip for sponsoring the board giveaways.