MicroEJ and Qt Group Join the Zephyr Project to Advance their Commitment to Secure, Connected, Future-Proof Devices

See Zephyr RTOS at Embedded World North America on October 8-10 

AUSTIN, Texas — October 8, 2024 —Today, the Zephyr® Project announced that MicroEJ and Qt Group have joined as Silver members. Zephyr, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a secure, connected and flexible RTOS for future-proof and resource-constrained devices, is easy to deploy and manage. It is a proven RTOS ecosystem created by developers for developers.

The project recently achieved several milestones including launching the 3.7 Long Term Support (LTS) release that provides product makers with a stable foundation for building future-proof embedded connected products. This release addresses the increasing complexity of today's microcontrollers and embedded devices by providing a new way to describe hardware capabilities. Additionally, Zephyr surpassed 100,000 commits in August since it was released in open source in 2015. The community has had an integral part of helping Zephyr support more than 700 boards running embedded microcontrollers from Arm and RISC-V to Tensilica, NIOS, ARC and x86 as single and multicore systems.

A Strong Ecosystem

Zephyr RTOS has a growing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors such as Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more. It is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long-term support releases and a growing open source ecosystem.

MicroEJ, a leading provider of embedded software containers, is known for its innovative Virtual Execution Environment (VEE), enabling cost-effective, scalable, and secure software development for constrained and low-power devices. With over 250Mu sold in large variety of industries, including smart home, wearables, healthcare, industrial automation, retail, telecommunications, smart city, building automation, transportation, etc., MicroEJ continues to empower developers and businesses alike by bridging the gap between cloud-native and embedded device technologies.

“Zephyr’s scalable BSP and RTOS perfectly complements our flexible, secure software containers and modular application frameworks for embedded systems, accelerating the port of MicroEJ VEE on Zephyr-enabled devices,” said Semir Haddad, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at MicroEJ. “At MicroEJ, our mission is to transform every featured electronic product into a smart product: a software-defined device. Together, we are providing even more powerful tools to meet the evolving needs of smart and connected devices."

Qt Group is the company behind the Qt Framework, a popular cross-platform development framework primarily used for developing applications with a graphical user interface. As part of this partnership, Qt Group announces plans to make its industry-leading graphical user interface solution compatible with the Zephyr framework.

"The Zephyr Project aims for seamless software interoperability across a wide range of hardware solutions. This is a goal we share and one of the cornerstones of Qt development throughout its history," said Toni Paila, Director, Qt for MCUs at Qt Group. "By opening our Qt for MCUs hardware adaptation layer, we accelerate the development of high-performance, low-cost systems, empowering our customers to deliver delightful user experiences on an even wider variety of platforms." 

MicroEJ and Qt Group join Ac6, Alif Semiconductor, Arduino, Arm, AVSystem, Baumer, BayLibre, Blues, Ezurio, Golioth, Infineon, IRNAS, Linaro, Memfault, Percepio, Renesas Electronics, Silicon Labs, Sternum, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Texas Instruments and Wind River as Silver members.

Zephyr Project Platinum members include Analog Devices, Antmicro, CARIAD, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Qualcomm Innovation Center and ZEISS.

Products powered by Zephyr

A few products powered by Zephyr that were recently highlighted on the website include:

• iFixit Power Station and Soldering Iron is a 100W portable power station and soldering iron that is easy to use for professionals or newcomers.
• BESA BP6X1 is an advanced battery management system with integrated power conversion.
• Conexio Stratus Pro is a tiny-yet-powerful development kit for creating cellular-connected electronic projects and products.
• The Mobile Measurement Platform (MPP) project involves designing and developing a prototype wearable device, a wristband for elderly individuals, known as the wristband for seniors.

Explore Zephyr RTOS up close:

Zephyr will be on display at embedded world North America, which takes place on October 8-10 in Austin, Texas, to present best practices, applications, products based on the RTOS and more including:

• Hands-on Workshop: This 3-hour hands-on workshop on October 8 at 9:30 am – 12:30 pm will introduce attendees to Analog Devices’ solutions that address this complexity challenge, based on open-source tooling, ecosystems (Zephyr, etc.), and config and debug tooling. Attendees will receive a MAX32690-based development platform to keep. Learn more and register here.
• Keynote Presentation: Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation, will give a keynote titled, “Building for Sustainable Development Goals with Open Source.” In this presentation on October 9 at 10:05 – 10:50 am, attendees will learn about how projects like Zephyr are helping product makers meet emerging requirements and how its ecosystem is making resource-constrained innovation possible.
• ADI Booth: The Zephyr Project will be inside the ADI booth #2304. Ambassadors will be on hand to walk through a few demos, discuss how Zephyr is being used at ADI to solve industry challenges. Stop by to get a kite and take your photo in front of the Zephyr kite.
• Meetup: Join the Zephyr community meetup on October 9, 2024, from 5:30 pm -7:00 pm at Capital Factory (701 Brazos St, Austin). Hosted by NXP Semiconductors, this gathering is for anyone who’s curious about Open Source, Embedded Systems Programming, and Software Development. There will be presentations based on products running Zephyr, subsystems and features and an opportunity to network with other community members. Learn more and register for the event here.

Learn more about Zephyr activities at embedded world here.

About the Zephyr Project

The Zephyr® Project is an open source, scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org. 

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