The Zephyr Project, an open source project to build a real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced growth of its IoT ecosystem with support for more than 100 developer boards and the addition of six new members. These industry and academic leaders include Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Zephyr Project aims to establish a neutral community where silicon vendors, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Original Design Manufacturer (ODMs) and Independent Software Vendor (ISVs) can contribute technology to reduce the cost and accelerate time to market for developing the billions of IoT devices. 

Over 100 boards supported

The dedication and talent of the growing Zephyr technical community has resulted in a significant expansion in board support as well as attracting more new developers each month. At launch in 2016, Zephyr was supported on only four boards including Arduino 101, Arduino Due, Intel Galileo Gen 2 and the FRDM-K64F Freedom development board from NXP® Semiconductors. Zephyr now supports more than 100 boards comprising of different architectures: ARM, x86, ARC, NIOS II, XTENSA, and RISCV32 processor families. For a complete list of boards and details, visit http://docs.zephyrproject.org/boards/boards.html. 

Growing Ecosystem 

In addition to this technical milestone, the Zephyr IoT ecosystem recently added new members including Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University. These companies join industry leaders such as Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP,  Oticon, Synopsys, and others.

"Developers have many choices when it comes to platforms. Zephyr offers the smallest memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices," said Anas Nashif, Chair of the Zephyr Project Technical Steering Committee and a Software Engineer at Intel's Open Source Technology Centre. "We are excited to welcome these member companies into our IoT ecosystem and look forward to collaborating with them to create and support a customizable, embedded open source platform."

In addition to these new members, the Zephyr technical community recently welcomed Thea Aldrich, a longtime open source participant, as a Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. She will be an active contributor to the technical roadmap, teaching Zephyr to new developers raising awareness of the project and coordinating communities.

She joins the already robust technical community that has more than 300 contributors on Github collaborating daily to create patches and help advance and manage new versions of Zephyr code that easily integrates with embedded devices regardless of architecture.

"A few years ago, I used Zephyr OS to solve many of the technical issues I was encountering with a wearables solution I created," said Thea Aldrich, Zephyr Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. "Zephyr's ease of use and scalability helped me with my solution and I was welcomed into this highly passionate open source community. Needless to say, I stumbled upon something more than just an RTOS and I could not be happier to have the opportunity to contribute to this community." Learn more about Thea here.