I don’t think most have this experience. Zephyr is the future.

I've had bad experiences with Zephyr in the past. It's been half-baked and passed around from company to company for ages.

Be Linux or don't be Linux, but don't be halfway between the two.

I have a lot more hope for PX5.

I actually disagree.

We have lower power bare metal systems, think AVR/STM stuff (in the 1Mhz to 50Mhz range with 128K or less of RAM) here FreeRTOS, no freeRTOS, custom driver code and some basic application code makes sense. For simple to very complex systems.

Then there's 1Ghz+ stuff with an MMU and 2GB+ RAM. Linux makes sense here.

Companies are now making chips 200Mhz+, 4MB RAM, with no MMU. This is precisely where Zephyr excels, you want a full networking stack? Switch that on. A file system, easy. Driver for some more complex thing? Maybe an SDIO radio? boomboom

nRF52820 is 256 KB Flash and 32 KB RAM chip. Actually it's around 150 KB flash, because you need space for 120KB softdevice blob (and some RAM too). And it's perfectly enough for many devices. They want developers to use Zephyr for this chip.

Zephyr provides an open source implementation of all layers of the BLE stack. The radios of some devices are documented extensively, Nordic nRF5 devices are probably the best example.

The Bluetooth SIG requires that you qualify your device if you advertise that you use Bluetooth IP, similar to what is required for the cellular space. Do you have to do this if you’re just “Bluetooth compatible?” Maybe not. Whatever the case you have to conduct FCC part 15C testing (intentional radiator).

> you have to conduct FCC part 15C testing (intentional radiator)

Maybe soon you won’t.

Care to elaborate?

Maybe orange man will abolish the FCC because rules are inefficient

He won't abolish the FCC. It is too efficient at attacking his enemies.

looking at his policy to China and Russia, maybe his enemies are not what we thought

His enemies are Americans that don't bow down.

the average defense job is the exact opposite of fulfilling and meaningful

Not if you like showing roughly the same set of slides 5x per week in meetings with roughly the same set of people in each one

Be aware, per erratum 9, that you’ll need to include external pull-downs instead of using the internal ones

Anybody notice that the example for their shell is using the Zephyr shell subsystem? Very cool that it's using Zephyr!

anybody doing new BLE products has a 50/50 shot of using Zephyr in current year. I think the real benefit of Zephyr is that the wheel has already been invented, no need to do it yourself

the pi pico is 100% supported in Zephyr. https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/tree/main/board... Did the author not check the docs? https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/raspberrypi/rpi...

Additionally, you aren't intended (for many situations) to use a single "main" Zephyr install, but to include what external modules you need in your project's west.yml. If you have a number of projects sharing the same Zephyr install that's a separate discussion but installing every possible toolchain/HAL is not the only way to do things.

Also it should be trivial to build using the GNU Arm Embedded toolchain if the author did not want to install the Zephyr SDK, not sure why this did not work for them.

RF dongles almost always are Nordic Semiconductor parts and they use their proprietary (but open) protocol called Enhanced Shockburst. The minimum latency of BLE is 7.5ms (fastest connection interval in the spec) while ESB can be in the 100s of microseconds. Not sure about power savings but latency is better.

> RF dongles almost always are Nordic Semiconductor parts and they use their proprietary (but open) protocol called Enhanced Shockburst.

Not really, Logitech actually uses the LE PHY even for their "RF" protocol, at least since the Logitech Bolt controller which is what TFA is talking about. You can sniff Bolt traffic with a LE sniffer.

> The minimum latency of BLE is 7.5ms (fastest connection interval in the spec) while ESB can be in the 100s of microseconds

This makes for an average 4ms of latency, which matches what Logitech advertises. Then USB is then going to introduce 5-10ms at the very least...

That's the one, thanks!

Zephyr would also be well suited for something like this. Anyone aware of any projects that do something similar with Zephyr?