Embedded Open Source Summit 2023

The landscape of hardware offers plentiful options in terms of SoCs, sensors, cameras and boards, but uneven availability, coverage in software and tools and lack of makes the experience of a product developer very unpredictable. Luckily, the Zephyr RTOS is emerging as a great equalizer of hardware, reflecting the hierarchies inherently present in hardware offerings with code, device trees and configs.

Combining this structured data with Renode, Antmicro’s open source, embedded hardware simulator, we built the Zephyr Dashboard, a massive CI testing exercise for hundreds of Zephyr targets, and Renodepedia, a portal to navigate the platforms, their components and data we have about them as well recreate the results. Systematizing this substantial amount of data lets us observe patterns that help build embedded systems more efficiently and contribute back to Zephyr to introduce even more structure and order, and we are working on expanding this to cover U-Boot and Linux.

Based entirely on open source tools, our hardware design process is also a pattern-matching and data organization exercise - and led to creating the Antmicro Open Hardware Portal, focused around and feeding our growing open source database of KiCad footprints, Blender 3D models and open hardware KiCad designs.

With all the data systematized through Renodepedia and the Open Hardware Portal, Antmicro is now developing an open source Visual System Designer platform which helps navigate the complexity of the hardware landscape by building system block diagrams from a library of well-defined components.

Visual System Designer can be described as an ultimate software/hardware resource - providing developers, product owners, business and marketing teams with a customizable, visual representation of real-world embedded platforms which can be simulated with Renode and seeded with software such as Zephyr or Linux. The tool can serve as a common interface between hardware and software teams and is already now being used to uncover even more patterns that have previously gone unnoticed.