What to Expect

The Zephyr Project Meetup in Braunschweig will feature an evening of technical presentations, community discussions, networking, and opportunities to connect with members of the local embedded systems community.

The sessions will explore products and applications running Zephyr, subsystem developments, practical implementation experiences, developer tools, hardware support, and Zephyr features that developers may not have encountered before.

Attendees will also have opportunities to meet developers, researchers, students, and contributors from the region, share their experiences, ask questions, and learn more about participating in the Zephyr Project.

Event Details

  • Date: August 13, 2026
  • Time: 5:30 pm–9:30 pm
  • Location: Institute der Informatik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany
  • Address: Informatikzentrum, 38106 Braunschweig-Nordstadt
  • Map: Check here
  • Organized by: Siemens
  • Venue host: TU Braunschweig
  • Hardware board sponsor: STMicroelectronics

Agenda

The meetup agenda will include technical presentations from the host team and members of the local Zephyr and embedded systems community.

5:30 pm – 6:00 pm: Welcome Drinks, Snacks, and Networking

6:00 pm – 6:15 pm: Welcome Note – Siemens and TU Braunschweig teams

6:15 pm – 6:30 pm: Embedded DX: From Datasheet to Zephyr Assets: Building an AI Workflow for Drivers, Devicetree, Kconfig and Tests – Madan Raj Mohanraj, Managing Director, Linumiz GmbH

How can hardware documentation be turned into reviewable Zephyr development assets without relying on cloud-based AI or black-box code generation?

This talk presents a technical walkthrough of Embedded DX, an AI-assisted workflow for Zephyr hardware enablement. The session will demonstrate how datasheets, reference manuals, register descriptions, schematics, and project requirements can be processed into structured engineering context and then mapped toward Zephyr-specific assets such as driver skeletons, devicetree bindings, Kconfig fragments, board overlays, sample applications, test scaffolding, and documentation.

The workflow is designed around staged generation rather than one-shot prompting. Each stage has a specific role: parsing hardware documentation, extracting interfaces and constraints, identifying registers and configuration options, mapping the result to Zephyr concepts, generating initial assets, preparing tests and documentation, and supporting human review. This makes the process more inspectable and easier to challenge than a generic prompt-to-code approach.

The presentation will focus on the technical workflow: input handling, context extraction, agent orchestration, framework-specific generation, traceability to source documentation, review checkpoints, and validation boundaries. It will also discuss limitations: where AI output must not be trusted blindly, where Zephyr-specific expertise is still required, and how generated code should be reviewed before being used in a real product.

The goal is to share an early but practical approach to domain-specific AI for Zephyr developer tooling and invite feedback from the community on what would be required for such a workflow to become useful, safe, and acceptable in real embedded projects.

6:35 pm – 7:05 pm: Contributing a DALI Driver for Zephyr – Dr. Sven Hädrich, Co-Founder, sevenlab engineering GmbH

DALI (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface) is the dominant standard for professional lighting control, yet firmware support for it has been absent from the Zephyr ecosystem — until now. This talk walks through the full journey of designing and upstreaming a DALI low-level driver into Zephyr mainline: from understanding the protocol’s precise timing and bus requirements, to crafting an API that fits naturally within Zephyr’s driver model, to surviving the community review process through multiple rounds of discussion and refactoring.

We’ll be honest about what was hard, what the community pushed back on, and what we’d do differently. The driver is experimental, the work is ongoing, and we’d love more hands on it. If you’re curious about how industrial lighting standards map onto Zephyr abstractions, or just enjoy a good upstream war story, this talk is for you.

7:10 pm – 7:40 pm: Zephyr in Safety-Critical Linux Architectures: Insights from ELISA – Philipp Ahmann, Automotive OSS Process Lead, ETAS GmbH

Zephyr is often associated with IoT devices where it serves as the primary operating system. However, safety-critical systems increasingly combine multiple software platforms to meet performance, isolation, and certification requirements. This talk explores how Zephyr can complement Linux and hypervisors such as Xen within larger system architectures. Drawing on experiences and activities from the Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA) Project, we will discuss emerging architectural patterns, the role of RTOS technologies in safety-oriented systems, and how open-source communities are collaborating to address these challenges.

7:40 pm – 7:55 pm: Break and Networking

7:55 pm – 8:25 pm: Public Money – Public Code: Smart Venues Using Zephyr – Benjamin Schilling and Laurin Wolf, Volunteer CEO and Volunteer CTO, MOSAIK

With the MOSAIK in Wolfenbüttel – best known for Jägermeister – we are building a voluntary-organized events venue to strengthen participation in rural communities and bring nightlife back to the town. With many volunteers and public funding we equip a 570m² music club with event lighting, PA equipment, bars, a practicing room and lots of automation devices to control everything. In this talk we want to present the project, the IT and OT infrastructure required to manage a modern venue as well highlight the role of Zephyr for our project – from device support, over protocols to ecosystem.

8:30 pm – 8:45 pm: Using Zephyr on Less-Maintained Hardware: FPGAs with NIOS-V/g Softcore CPUs – Mika Braunschweig, Working Student, Siemens Mobility GmbH

While the SoCs of some vendors can usually be expected to just work with Zephyr, there are also SoCs inside Zephyr that were added but don’t receive much attention, sometimes even with just one board that isn’t actively maintained. This presentation focuses on some rather easy problems that arose while trying to use such a system, namely a NIOS-V/g softcore + related peripherals and how people can start looking into such problems, even if they don’t have much experience with Zephyr internals yet.

8:50 pm – 9:20 pm: What Makes an RTOS Safe? – Tobias Kästner, Solution Architect Medical IoT, inovex GmbH

In this talk, we dive deep into the Zephyr kernel to explore the foundational architectural choices driving its safety and reliability. We will examine how Zephyr guarantees deterministic scheduling and analyze its symmetric design of kernel primitives, built on top of unified waiting list management. Next, we’ll break down the critical separation between hardware-dependent and independent layers, alongside Zephyr’s approach to memory safety. Finally, we will look at where Zephyr still needs to improve, addressing on-going work like kernel code reorganization, leaner header file inclusions, redundant memory structures, and continuous self-tests. We will conclude with a look at how formal methods can further solidify the kernel’s design.

9:30 pm onwards: Quiz & Board giveaways followed by closing remarks

Registration

Registration is required so the hosts can plan the available space, food, and event logistics accordingly. Seats are limited, so we encourage interested attendees to register soon to secure their place. Register for the meetup here.

Thank You to Our Supporters

Thank you to Siemens for organizing the Zephyr Project Meetup in Braunschweig and helping bring the local embedded systems community together.

Thank you to TU Braunschweig for hosting the meetup and providing a space where developers, students, researchers, and industry professionals can meet, learn, and exchange ideas.

A special thank you to STMicroelectronics for sponsoring the development board giveaways and supporting hands-on learning and community engagement at the event.

The support of our organizers, venue host, sponsor, speakers, volunteers, and attendees makes community gatherings like this possible.

Board Giveaways and Food and Beverage Sponsorship

Development board giveaways, food, and refreshments help make Zephyr community meetups more welcoming, interactive, and valuable for attendees.

Organizations interested in sponsoring development boards, food, or beverages for an upcoming Zephyr Project Meetup can complete the sponsorship interest form. The meetup organizers will follow up with information about suitable events and coordination details.

About the Zephyr Community Meetups

This meetup is part of the Zephyr Community Meetup Series, a collection of local gatherings hosted by community members with support from the Zephyr Project.

These events provide a welcoming space for developers, students, researchers, and embedded systems enthusiasts to exchange technical knowledge, present real-world projects, discuss challenges, and build stronger local open source communities.

Whether you are based in Braunschweig, elsewhere in Germany, or another part of the world, we encourage community members, companies, universities, and developer groups to get involved.

Reach out to us and explore how you can bring Zephyr to your community and make a difference in the world of IoT development.

To keep up to date about the project, subscribe to the Zephyr quarterly newsletter or connect with us on @ZephyrIoT, Zephyr Project LinkedIn or the Zephyr Discord Channel to talk with community and TSC members.

We look forward to seeing everyone in Braunschweig!