Sam Blenny has created a new Adafruit Playground Note for folks interested in learning about the microcontroller real-time operating system Zephyr.
The first section shows, step by step, how to work through the Zephyr Getting Started Guide to install Zephyr on Linux, build the hello world sample, and run it on an Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S3.
The second part has notes for tuning the default settings to use fewer resources for faster CI builds.
What are Zephyr and West?
The Zephyr Real Time Operating System (RTOS) provides an abstraction layer that helps make it easier to port applications like CircuitPython to boards from various manufacturers.
In theory, using an RTOS makes it easier to implement features using audio synthesis, graphic displays, HTTPS, MQTT, BLE, etc. By building on top of Zephyr APIs, rather than vendor-specific SDK APIs, application code can ignore some of the differences between microcontroller families. Zephyr helps with low-level hardware details and coordinating CPU time for concurrent tasks including application logic, hardware IO, network stacks, and number crunching.
Zephyr has a command line tool called
west
to manage and coordinate the many tasks involved in working on a Zephyr project. Once you install west, you can dowest help
to see documentation on the available sub-commands.
Read more in the Note here.