23rd Fribourg Linux Seminar : Operating Systems for IoT

Nowadays creators of Embedded Systems - from large, high-performance machines to IoT devices - have a considerable number of options regarding Operating Systems. As a result, one is often left with the question "What Operating System fits my usage best?"

Suppliers "advertise" their own Operating System flavour - including development framework and programming language - resulting in a long learning phase before one appreciates what option could fit the purpose.

The goal of the event is to give an overview of available, open source, modern yet (sufficiently) mature Operating System solutions for Embedded Systems as well as hands-on Operating Systems deployments coming from the industry.

Agenda

- 16h45 : Reception of Attendees

- 17h00 : Welcome (Jacques Supcik Professor HEIA-FR, Luca Haab HEIA-FR)

- 17h10 : How to combine FreeRTOS and Linux? (Arnaud Sautaux - embedded specialist - MC-Monitoring)

Writing code for microcontrollers seems easy at the beginning. You simply implement features inside an infinite loop. By adding features, it becomes more complex and harder to maintain. Structuring your project with FreeRTOS, you’ll be able to parallelize tasks and use convenient libraries. In addition, debugging FreeRTOS is very comfortable through the graphical tool Tracealyzer.

Later, you might want to add features available for Linux; thus, you must combine FreeRTOS with Linux. How to perform this?

- 17h40 : A brief overview of ZephyrOS (Markus Kappeler, CEO at bytsatwork and Guy Morand, Software Engineer at bytesatwork)

ZephyrOS is a small open source real time operating system supported by the Linux Foundation. It is designed to run on low-end IoT devices and has attracted more and more attention in the last few years. At bytesatwork, we have been using it with a lot of success and would like
to share our experience.

This talk will give you brief introduction of ZephyrOS, its device driver model, the west build system, some of the best practices as well as some real world implementations. It should help newcomers to get an overview of its core capabilities and maybe considering it for their next project.

- 18h15 : IoT development using Nerves and Elixir (Loïc Stankovic, C++ and Elixir software engineer and co-founder at offsync)

Prototyping and iterating quickly on an IoT project can be difficult, especially when Linux customization and cross-compilation come into play. Even harder when the goal is to create a high-quality product. It doesn't have to be this hard though! By leveraging the vibrant ecosystem and welcoming community of Elixir, a functional programming language based on Erlang, the Nerves Project introduces a new way to work on embedded devices. It provides fully-featured platform, framework, and tools to easily and rapidly create IoT devices.

At offsync, a brand new hackerspace in Fribourg, we needed a way to know when someone is present in our workshop. Join Loïc, C++ and Elixir software engineer and offsync's cofounder, in his journey to build a connected RFID scanner using these technologies.

- 18h55 : Information HEIA-FR (Roland Scherwey, Professor HEIA-FR)

- 19h05 : Aperitive and Networking

Sponsors:

bytesatwork : https://www.bytesatwork.io/
Swiss Engineering: https://www.swissengineering.ch/
HEIA-FR : Haute école d'ingénierie et d'architecture de Fribourg
iSIS : ​​Institut des systèmes intelligents et sécurisés

Slides / Languages

EN: The slides will be in English and the talks will be either in English, French, or German (according to the speaker's preference).

FR: Les transparents seront en anglais et les présentations pourront être faites en français, en anglais, ou en allemand (selon la préférence de l'orateur).

DE: Die Folien werden auf Englisch sein und die Vorträge können entweder auf Deutsch, Englisch oder Französisch gehalten werden (je nach Vorliebe des Sprechers).

You can download the flyers and handouts of the previous seminars from our GIT repository (https://gitlab.forge.hefr.ch/fribourg-linux-seminar/seminars).

Contact Info

Feel free to suggest something using the discussion page: https://www.meetup.com/fr-FR/Fribourg-Linux-Seminar/discussions/

We are also always interested in good speakers, so if you want to present something during a seminar, just fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/yQpJO0kJi1y0Blqu2

You can also contact the organizers by e-mail at jacques.supcik@hefr.ch or luca.haab@hefr.ch