Golioth is at the Embedded Online Conference!

We love going to conferences. It’s great way to meet new people and learn about interesting new areas of the IoT industry. Unfortunately, IoT-interested engineers are spread far and wide around the world. Enter the Embedded Online Conference (EOC), which helps to connect engineers in the far flung reaches of the earth. Engineers benefit from downloading new knowledge from the comfort of their homes and companies like Golioth get to meet engineers working on novel problems in the IoT space.

We are giving 3 talks at the conference this year, let’s take a look at what those are about:

Mike Szczys – Building a Modular Codebase with Zephyr RTOS and Devicetree

Developer Relations Engineer Mike Szczys is talking about one of our favorite subjects: using Zephyr for more efficient code!

If there’s one thing the chip shortage has taught us, it’s to be ready to pivot to different hardware on a short timeline. Mike has found that the Zephyr Real-Time Operating System makes this much less painful for firmware engineers. It borrows many concepts from the Linux ecosystem, delivering Devicetree, Pin Control, and Kconfig to microcontroller-land.

This talk details how to use Zephyr to maintain one codebase that can be built for many different hardware combinations. Once Kconfig and Devicetree overlay files have been created for each target, compiling the same project for Nordic, Espressif, or NXP chips (to name just a few) is simple. Changing vendors or models of sensor and other peripherals is a similar experience. The C code grabs all necessary hardware information like what pins are connected and which peripheral bus should be used for a particular build. From there it’s just a matter of changing the board name in the build command.

Dylan Swartz – Leveraging DevOps for Streamlined Firmware Delivery

One of our newest teammates, and our first product manager, Dylan Swartz is showcasing how to deploy firmware to embedded devices over the internet using modern techniques.

This talk provides a comprehensive understanding of how DevOps principles are applied to IoT development for improved efficiency and reliability. He discusses integrating firmware builds and over-the-air (OTA) updates into a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, resulting in increased release frequency, dependability, and quality. The presentation draws from real-world IoT projects that have successfully implemented DevOps methodologies to expedite time-to-market and enhance overall performance.

Attendees will gain practical knowledge of best practices for troubleshooting, monitoring, and scaling IoT deployments, ensuring that devices remain secure and updated throughout their life cycle. This session delivers valuable insights into implementing DevOps for IoT, equipping attendees with the tools and techniques necessary to optimize their embedded system development processes.

Chris Gammell – Improve your Embedded IoT Hardware Today

This talk is about getting more out of your “Rev A” hardware: how do you maximize the information you can generate during the expensive prototyping process?

I (Chris here) show how to add in hooks and capabilities that make troubleshooting, upgrading, and measuring deficiencies much easier. Your second rev will be leaps and bounds ahead of your first, and you can get to market faster.

This talk showcases components, tools, and troubleshooting methods that enable better hardware, regardless of the parts you choose or the form factor you need to fit into. As an example, Chris shows some recently created hardware that focused on modularity and flexbility. It was not targeted at a production environment, but forms the basis for a good “rev a” build of hardware and help engineers to focus on validating new product ideas before digging into more complex layouts and smaller form factors.

Interested in attending?

We would love to see you at the EOC this year! All the Golioth talks can be viewed by registering for free. We also have a $100 off coupon for anyone interested in full access to all talks just use the code GOLIOTH2023 when you register for the conference. We will be doing a Q&A session, as are many of the other speakers at the conference. The conference starts April 24th, 2023, but is available for the rest of the year.