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So I've contributed a couple of (tiny!) patches to Zephyr and wrote my own board support / devicetree setup for a custom Cortex-M4F setup that I designed. Zeph

So I've contributed a couple of (tiny!) patches to Zephyr and wrote my own board support / devicetree setup for a custom Cortex-M4F setup that I designed. Zephyr is awesome and the community is awesome, IMHO. Using CLion to manage the CMake-based build is awesome. What's not quite so awesome? The plethora of Kconfig items. Even with "make menuconfig" it can be very difficult to keep track of what you've configured in and what you've configured out. For 90% of most projects, I'd expect the defaults to be sane. In fact, probably better than the ones an inexperienced dev would select. But when you want that last 10%, it can be a real challenge. I've had much more luck with Zephyr than I did with FreeRTOS or mbed (and I've used mbed a lot...)!

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Total opposite. I’m having much more luck with FreeRTOS now that it’s an Amazon product than I was with Zephyr. I’m using it with AWS though, so this isn’t much of a surprise. I’m not sure it’ll go anywhere, but I think it’s no coincidence zephyr is setting up to support multiple cores - and Nordic just released a dual core chip and signed on early to Zephyr.
- bsder 7y ago
  Nordic signed on for Zephyr and Segger Embedded Studio. Nordic clearly are signaling "we're tired of spending money on infrastructure software". I hope they know what they are doing. IMO, the Nordic BLE stack was one of their primary competitive advantages.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Agreed! They insist they aren’t dumping their stack (yes they are) but incorporating ideas in to Zephyr. That said, they were definitely on the wrong track with SDKs that wildly changed every 6 months and were almost impossible to keep up with! Their stack being FCC certified is a huge bonus. Saves weeks of work and $10,000 or so to not have to do full FCC cert instead of just emission testing. As to Segger Studio, it’s Rowley Crossworks and while I miss a couple of things from Keil it has been an overall better experience for some reason.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

Total opposite. I’m having much more luck with FreeRTOS now that it’s an Amazon product than I was with Zephyr. I’m using it with AWS though, so this isn’t much of a surprise. I’m not sure it’ll go anywhere, but I think it’s no coincidence zephyr is setting up to support multiple cores - and Nordic just released a dual core chip and signed on early to Zephyr.

bsder 7y ago
Nordic signed on for Zephyr and Segger Embedded Studio. Nordic clearly are signaling "we're tired of spending money on infrastructure software". I hope they know what they are doing. IMO, the Nordic BLE stack was one of their primary competitive advantages.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Agreed! They insist they aren’t dumping their stack (yes they are) but incorporating ideas in to Zephyr. That said, they were definitely on the wrong track with SDKs that wildly changed every 6 months and were almost impossible to keep up with! Their stack being FCC certified is a huge bonus. Saves weeks of work and $10,000 or so to not have to do full FCC cert instead of just emission testing. As to Segger Studio, it’s Rowley Crossworks and while I miss a couple of things from Keil it has been an overall better experience for some reason.