Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Zephyr west tool is a powerful workspace manager, but it is admittedly pretty feature-rich: there’s a lot of functionality buried inside that tool! I thought it would be interesting to share a few tips and tricks that I use with west to make my Zephyr development workflow a little smoother.

Let’s suppose you’re building an even smarter fishtank. You’re adding temperature and salinity sensors, logging timestamped readings to flash. The struct is your binary record format – every field at a fixed byte offset, so you can read it back on any system that knows the layout. You use fixed-width types from stdint.h and pack(1) to strip out compiler-inserted padding. This is the advice I had always received and given, and it’s correct – as far as it goes.

While it has taken longer than some people expected, Matter is finally going mainstream. Brands including Ikea, Kwikset, and Bosch have shipped matter devices, and matter hubs can increasingly be found in people’s homes. Many dev kits out there are matter compatible, and if you want to build a simple application you can find good example code and get started quickly. This is fine if your use case fits neatly within existing Matter clusters, but direct internet communication is not straightforward.

It was around mid-2023 that I realized, despite working as a developer in the field, my knowledge of embedded systems needed a significant refresh. It was time to revisit some of the fundamentals and catch up on the latest technologies and best practices. As I began listing topics to review, I searched for existing embedded systems roadmaps online. However, none perfectly matched my specific learning goals.

This series of articles discusses the development of a SOTA Open Smart Ring － a tiny wearable packed with electronics that fits on your (even the smallest) finger. We dive deep into what it means to develop such a product, its challenges, and ultimately, how to make it a manufacturable and usable piece.

In our previous posts (Part 1 & Part 2), we covered how Linux coredumps are structured, how they’re collected, and how we could reduce the size of them to fit on systems with less memory. In this post, we’ll go over a method of coredump collection that does the stack unwinding on-device.

This series of articles discusses the development of a SOTA Open Smart Ring － a tiny wearable packed with electronics that fits on your (even the smallest) finger. We dive deep into what it means to develop such a product, its challenges, and ultimately, how to make it a manufacturable and usable piece.

This article chronicles my unexpected 3-hour adventure using Claude to create Gophyr: a fully functional Gopher client for Zephyr, complete with a Zephyr shell command set.

In our previous article, we outlined what a Linux coredump is and how they work under the hood. One common constraint we see in embedded Linux, however, is a limited amount of storage space. Whether we’re trying to limit writes to disk, or need to reserve most of the disk space available to a device for other data, sometimes we just don’t have enough space to store coredumps.

It’s Friday around 4 PM. You’ve been on a productivity tear and are getting to wrap up for the week when, all of a sudden, things go off the rails. Logging has stopped entirely with no clues to the problem, your LED has stopped blinking, and even the debug CLI you painstakingly coded has stopped responding to any of your commands. “But I wasn’t even making a complicated change!” you yell into the void.