Zephyr Developer Summit 2022

Hardware companies are facing daily struggles with the global chip shortage. Often the solution is to re-design a board with different processors, sensors, or architectures. In this talk, we 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 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 is really powerful. Zephyr makes it easy to manage firmware pipelines to hardware variants.  We use standardized board-to-board connectors instead of making custom PCBs for different variants, but a similar firmware build solution works for both. Our approach embraces a flexible hardware design and an RTOS that’s built for it.