Golioth will be at the Zephyr Developer Summit

The Zephyr Developer Summit (ZDS) is coming up June 7th-9th 2022 in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum. Golioth will be there and we’re very excited to interact with fellow users, developers, and stakeholders in the open source real-time operating system (RTOS) known as Zephyr!

We love Zephyr

People reading this blog will not be surprised to know that we love Zephyr. We write about it quite often and it is the basis of our Zephyr-based SDK. As a result, many of our samples and demos are built using Zephyr. We often talk about Zephyr being an indicator that a hardware device will work with Golioth; all you need is a network connection, a board running Zephyr, and little bit of storage overhead to hold the Golioth code. It’s the hardware interoperability of Zephyr that allows Golioth users to target a wide range of platforms, including microcontrollers from Espressif, Infineon, Intel, Microchip, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor…and more being added every day!

Our plans at ZDS

We’re excited to be returning to ZDS. Last year we officially announced Golioth to the world at ZDS, and talked about how our platform works within the Zephyr ecosystem. We hope to have another year of connection, this time in person and online. Let’s look at how we’ll be participating.

Sponsoring/Showcase

We are helping to sponsor ZDS this year. We believe in the mission of the project and the conference and wanted to be part of it. We will also be showcasing Golioth at a vendor table at the conference. If you would like to see Golioth in action, you can stop by at any time to ask questions and see demos. You can, of course, also try out Golioth at any time using our Dev Tier plan, which gives anyone up to 50 free devices on the platform.

Giving Talks

We will be presenting a range of talks at ZDS:

• What chip shortage? How we use Zephyr for truly modular hardware
  • Chris and Mike from Developer Relations will highlight the Aludel, an internal hardware platform we’ve built as a customizable solution that can switch out hardware pieces without major redesign. This modular hardware showcases a path for hardware and firmware teams to unify their codebase using Zephyr while targeting a wide range of hardware. Being able to swap out a sensor, microcontroller, or radio but keep the main board, or go from outdoor air monitoring to indoor monitoring is really powerful. Zephyr makes it much easier to create alternate builds and manage firmware pipelines to hardware variants.
• Connecting Zephyr Logging to the Cloud over Constrained Channels
  • Our resident Zephyr expert Marcin will cover an approach to preparing Zephyr logging messages for transmission through a constrained networking layer, such as a cellular connection. This includes CBOR compression on all logging messages, including special handling around binary payloads. There is also an interface to a CoAP library to take advantage of smaller payloads and standardized format to a cloud backend. Additional tooling is included for selectable acknowledgement of messages, to handle high priority and high traffic scenarios.
• Zephyr <3 Internet: How Zephyr speeds implementation for new IoT devices
  • I (Jonathan, CEO) will make a case to people outside of the Zephyr ecosystem on why they should adopt the platform and contrast the difficulties to other RTOS solutions. These networking concepts are so baked-in that it fundamentally changes the cost for anyone buying into the ecosystem. From vendors adding modems to developers building apps, the underlying framework saves time and engineering complexity.
• End-to-end IoT development with Zephyr
  • Founding engineer Alvaro will cover the options for getting a Zephyr app connected (WiFi, Ethernet, Cellular), selecting the right data encoding (JSON/CBOR), securing the data transfer (DTLS/TLS), and choosing a protocol (HTTP/MQTT/COAP). But that’s not the end of the story, the cloud needs to manage devices allowed to connect, consume the data being received, open up options for using that data, and be aware of the continued state of the hardware. And once you have the data you need to build a user-facing application on top of it.

Giving a workshop

Hands-on demos are a critical part of understanding a new system. This is true of both Zephyr and of Golioth. We wanted to showcase how Golioth works to Zephyr users, while also helping people get a real piece of hardware talking to the cloud. We’re giving a workshop called “Hands-on with Zephyr-based IoT Hardware – Data Goes in, Data Comes Out, Data Goes Up“.  This is a hands-on developer training showing how to get a finished piece of hardware utilizing the various features that Zephyr has to offer. The main thrust of the training is getting up and running with the Zephyr toolchain, implementing examples on a piece of hardware (provided), and interacting with cloud services. The user will learn about various abstraction layers around things like CoAP and CBOR, and experience a real world example of a smart device talking back to the Golioth Cloud. This will also expose the user to web-side technologies and how they can export data to external commercial services like AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Meeting with users and partners

We love our community and are always looking to meet new people within it. Interested in setting up a time to discuss something? Email [email protected]

Should you attend?

If you’re a someone already developing for Zephyr and pushing code upstream, this is the best opportunity to meet with others from the community and continue to build your skills. We think this is a perfect event for you!

If you’re new to Zephyr, the content can seem a bit intimidating…but fear not! The first half day of the conference (June 7th starting at 1 pm) is the “Intro to Zephyr” day, and this is a great introduction to the platform and how you can build your skills using Zephyr. There are also reduced cost tickets for students, if you’re still learning. We think if you’re looking to build a product with Zephyr in the future, or already are building with Zephyr, it’s a worthwhile experience to be there.

See you there!

We’re excited to meet more people and hear the other great talks that will be happening at the 2022 Zephyr Developer Summit. While we definitely plan to share the talks after the fact, and you can also participate in the virtual conference, we still hope to see you there!