Embedded Open Source Summit 2023

TL;DR:

Link to our talk

Link to Szymon’s talk on Green Software for Embedded Devices

By the end of June, me and Szymon travelled to Prague, Czech Republic for the Embedded Open Source Summit 2023 where we participated in the conference both as speakers and attendees. We also attended Xen Developer Summit and the Yocto Project Dev Day!

Our talk

Our talk titled “Porting an AI Powered Wearable Health Monitor to Zephyr on Open Hardware boasted almost full room by which we were very flattered. Warm thanks to everyone who engaged with us after the talk and hope you took away something useful from this presentation.

In short, we presented a war-story where we worked on adding support for QuickLogic’s EOS S3 SoC running the Zephyr real-time operating system, while deploying a Blood Pressure prediction model that you may already know from this post. The model was deployed using TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers which proved to be very easy and accurate.

Here you may see the breadboard prototype as we didn’t have time to remake the original case Szymon envisioned for the previous iteration of this project.

Beagleboard.org

The highlights from this conference include finally meeting Jason Kridner - the founder of beagleboard.org for whom we had the pleasure to create projects during Google Summer of Code 2021 where I did GPGPU computing with BBB and Szymon started porting Zephyr support for Wio Terminal to act as a Greybus host for BeagleConnect Freedom. We also met other folks from the beagleboard.org organization including Kathy Giori and Drew Fustini who conducted a panel regarding future of beagleboard.org foundation.

BTW - fresh RISC-V board dropped from beagleboard.org - BeagleV Ahead based on Alibaba T-Head chip!

Zephyr

We also met some Zephyr people who helped us a lot during development of this project - Chris Friedt or Henrik Brix Andersen as well as Benjamin Cabé. Actually, there are already three PR’s that were the direct result of our participation in this conference and in this project 1,2, 3. Being an Open Source contributor to such an important project is surely satisfying 😎.

We plan to continue extending our support for Zephyr for this board by adding support for more peripherals and trying to decouple the Zephyr subsystem implementation from the Hardware Abstraction Layer from Quicklogic. Also, since I have always been eager to learn PCB design we might create a single PCB for this solution (but that’s a stretch and the day has only 24 hours, eh?).

I now have a beautiful Zephyr kite 🪁 (that I wish I could surf on 😁) in my living/hacking room.

Oh we also had the opportunity to see Josef’s Prusa HQ in Holešovice Praha.

What’s next?

Since we are only getting started, expect us on further conferences around Autumn (Hackaday Supercon and RISC-V Summit 😉 - not yet confirmed), and now we will enjoy some well deserved rest and vacation 😄 (Windsurfing 🏄‍♂️ time for Szymon and some gym 🏋️ and cycling 🚴‍♂️ for me). Enjoy the Summer folks!

Also, stay tuned for something from Sticky Piston Studios as even though we will be mostly resting, something nice is en-route 😁