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Zephyr RTOS Development

Production Zephyr firmware. BLE provisioning, WiFi, LoRa, OTA, crash reporting, storage, displays and multi-year battery life, shipping in the OGLAS v2 platform.

Zephyr RTOS in production firmware

The full connected-device stack on Zephyr (BLE configuration, WiFi, LoRa, over-the-air updates, crash reporting, storage, displays and multi-year battery life), shipping today in the second-generation OGLAS firmware across nRF52840, ESP32 and STM32.

See it in OGLAS →

Overview

Zephyr is my RTOS of choice for connected products. It is vendor-neutral, so the same codebase runs on Nordic, Espressif and ST silicon. Devicetree and Kconfig keep board differences out of application code, west manages builds and dependencies, and Bluetooth, networking, power management, storage and firmware update are maintained subsystems in the tree.

Every capability below is shipping in the second-generation OGLAS firmware, in hubs and sensors deployed to off-grid sites where a locked-up device cannot be fixed by driving out to it. So the devices have to configure themselves in the field, update themselves remotely, report their own crashes and run for years on a battery.

Capabilities

BLE configuration & provisioning

Custom GATT services for on-site commissioning: set WiFi credentials, radio settings and site parameters from a phone, with secure pairing. There is no serial cable or laptop needed in the paddock.

WiFi

Station and access-point provisioning flows, credential storage, and reconnect handling for networks that come and go, including BLE/WiFi coexistence on ESP32-class parts.

LoRa & long-range radio

Zephyr LoRa on SX126x-class radios (RAK4631 / nRF52840), the radio layer under the OGLAS sensor network. See the Mesh & LoRa and Gateway pages.

Long-term battery management

Zephyr device power management, sleep states and duty-cycling for multi-year field life, with battery telemetry so a fading device shows up in the data well before it stops reporting. Ultra-low-power deep-sleep design is a speciality.

OTA updates

MCUboot dual-slot images with signed firmware and rollback, delivered over BLE or WiFi to devices you may never physically touch again. A failed update falls back to the previous image.

Crash reporting

Fault handlers, coredumps, and persisted crash and reboot-reason logging, so a field failure comes home with the data. That is how the rare bugs get found.

Storage & settings

NVS and the Zephyr settings subsystem for configuration and calibration, and flash filesystems for data logging, all designed to survive power loss, because off-grid power fails without warning.

Displays

OLED, eInk and LCD panels under Zephyr’s display subsystem and LVGL, from always-on status screens to eInk that draws no power between refreshes. See Custom Displays.

RTC & timekeeping

Battery-backed RTC and time synchronisation across sensors and hubs, so data from an off-grid site is correctly timestamped even after weeks with no uplink and no NTP.

Platforms

One application codebase with per-board devicetree overlays and Kconfig fragments. That is the point of Zephyr, and it is how the OGLAS v2 firmware is structured.

Platform Boards Strengths
nRF52840 RAK4631, SenseCAP T1000-E BLE + SX1262 LoRa, exceptional sleep currents
ESP32 / ESP32-S3 Heltec V3 and custom boards WiFi + BLE, displays, plenty of headroom
STM32 Custom and off-the-shelf boards Wide part range, industrial peripherals, RTC

In production in OGLAS v2

The second-generation OGLAS hub and sensor firmware is built on Zephyr and uses everything on this page in production: BLE-commissioned, LoRa-connected, OTA-updatable devices that log locally, report their own faults and run unattended for years. If your product needs the same, I can help.