Zephyr Workshop

Welcome to this Zephyr Workshop! This workshop is designed for everyone who is new to Zephyr. This repository includes slides firmware samples and a modular application. It links to existing references on how to get started and explains basic RTOS concepts with examples.

The slides will guide you through the content and the hands-on parts of the workshop. Please check out the pdf version of the slides at the releases section

Resources to quickly get started with Zephyr:

• Zephyr Documentation
• Supported Boards
• Samples and Demos
• Zephyr GitHub Repository

Documentation and Slides 📖

The workshop includes both a web-based documentation (Sphinx) and a slide presentation (Slidev). The slides are integrated into the documentation.

Building the Documentation

The documentation is located in the doc folder. To build the full documentation including the integrated slides, use tox:

cd doc
# Build integrated HTML documentation (Sphinx + Slides)
tox -e html
# Or for live preview with autobuild
tox -e docs

The output will be available in doc/_build/html/index.html.

Note

Slidev uses ES Modules and cannot be opened directly via the file:// protocol. You must serve the documentation via a web server (e.g., using tox -e docs for local preview).

Slides 📊

The presentation slides are located in doc/slides and are written with Slidev. They are automatically built and included when building the documentation, but they can also be built standalone:

cd doc
tox -e slides

The standalone build output is located in doc/slides_dist/zephyr-workshop_slides.

Live Preview (Development)

For the best experience when editing slides, use the Slidev development server which provides instant hot-reloading:

cd doc/slides
npm install
npm run dev

Presentation License

The content in the doc/slides directory is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). A full copy of the license text is available in the LICENSE_PRESENTATION file at the root of this repository.

Firmware 🛠

Samples

There are several samples in the folder samples. These samples are mostly adapted from the Zephyr GitHub Repository and referenced here for a better overview. All samples can be built as Zephyr workspace examples.

Modular Application

The modular application is a simple example of a modular application that consists of multiple modules. Different modules communicate with each oter via Zephyr's Zbus. The application is located at ´app´, related tests are in the ´tests´ folder.

The application should run on most supported boards as it only uses a button and an led.

To run and explore integration tests with twister, you can build the tests and application for mulitple boards:

west twister -T app/ -T test/ --integration

Github Codespaces Environment

Just click on the button <> Code above to create a Github Codespaces environment for the workshop. For further instructions, please refer to the slides.

Local Environment

Setup the with existing Zephyr Project Workspace

After completing the Zephyr Getting Started guide, you should already have a project folder setup. In this case, you can just clone this repository into the existing zephyrproject folder:

# clone this repository in the existing zephyrproject folder
cd zephyrproject
git clone https://github.com/jonas-rem/zephyr-workshop
# Change west config manifest file location to the zephyr-workshop repository
west config manifest.path zephyr-workshop
cd zephyr-workshop
# update Zephyr modules
west update

Setup from Scratch

To set up a new Zephyr workspace directly from this repository, west can be used with the following options:

# Initialize a workspace named zephyrproject from this repository.
west init -m https://github.com/jonas-rem/zephyr-workshop --mr main zephyrproject
# update Zephyr modules
cd zephyrproject/zephyr-workshop
west update

Building and running of the Firmware Samples

# e.g. for reel_board
west build -b reel_board samples/01_hello_world -p

# Or for native execution on the host system
west build -b native_sim samples/01_hello_world -p

Once the sample is build, run the following command to flash/run it:

# on a board
west flash

# native_sim execution
west build -t run

Building and Running the Application on native_sim

The application can be built and run on native_sim for testing without hw:

# Build the application
west build -b native_sim app -p

# Run with shell on separate UART (creates predictable symlink)
./build/zephyr/zephyr.exe -uart_1_attach_uart_cmd='ln -sf %s /tmp/zephyr_shell'

This creates two separate consoles:

• Logs - Appear in the terminal output (uart0)
• Shell - Accessible via /tmp/zephyr_shell symlink (uart1)

Interact with the shell:

# Send commands to the application
echo "my_app button button_press" > /tmp/zephyr_shell
echo "help" > /tmp/zephyr_shell

# Or use screen for interactive session
tio /tmp/zephyr_shell