The Embedded Recipes conference is a small but highly influential annual event, attracting around 100 attendees and featuring a single-track program in one room. Its relaxed and informal atmosphere encourages meaningful and spontaneous interactions among participants. In this Mind Technical Talk, we distill the key takeaways from the event, summarize core technical insights and spotlight emerging trends in the Linux kernel and embedded systems communities.
This talk explores the journey of implementing and upstreaming USB-MIDI support in Zephyr RTOS, starting from a custom music controller project. We'll first look at the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) specification from the 1980's and how it evolved into MIDI2 recently. We will then dive into practical consideration for actually exchanging MIDI data with a USB host. We will look deeper into Zephyr's USB device_next stack; the newer, more dynamic way of implementing actual USB devices using this fancy kite-stamped RTOS. If you are not familiar with it, this is also an occasion to have a glimpse at the device model and how Zephyr applications and drivers are structured.
Fleetminder is a device fleet simulator and modeling system. It implements a user-friendly dashboard that monitors, controls and manages a fleet of simulated, real or live devices in the field. Fleetminder is in the early stages of development and is designed to support commercial projects by exploring use cases such as: (1) OTA device updates and secure boot, (2) OT-IT network gateways, (3) Scale-up scenarios in fleet management, (4) Multi-tenancy and multi-partner data systems. This presentation covers the architecture, the current state of development, the workflows employed for implementation and testing, and future directions.
The Linux kernel is constantly evolving, with 5 or 6 stable releases per year. Each release brings new functionality and adds support for new hardware. This talk will cover some of the changes in 2024 and 2025 that are particularly useful for embedded systems development.
Each year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the FOSDEM event in Brussels. This year, this busy and organic conference hosted 79 tracks with 1143 speakers and 1088 events. Our Mind colleagues, Arnout, Frederik, Hugo, Raphaël and others, attended the FOSDEM conference and present a summary of some of the presentations during this free format Mind Tech Talk. Everyone is welcome to attend and questions are warmly welcome.
System design can be a process to explore better possibilities, FPGA is one flexible possibility to embedded system design. This presentation uses a traffic offloading example to illustrate why FPGA is a possibility worth trying; explains the junction of FPGA and Linux development work flow using Zynq-7000 as the target hardware. It shows a naive but real example to illustrate the meaning of (better or worse) possibility. Finally, it skims through some novel trending in the Linux and FPGA area.
Charles-Antoine and Olivier have attended the small and cosy Kernel Recipes conference in Paris of which Mind is a sponsor. They will explain what important people involved in Linux kernel project (Steven Rostedt, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Julia Lawall, Hans de Goede) are doing, which are the trends, the challenges and the hot topics in kernel development. During these 3 days, the main subjects were security, Rust, performance and real time!
At some point, every engineer will use a tool and think, “I could probably create a better solution.” About two years ago, I had an experience examining activity files from a sports smartwatch, which prompted me to explore various libraries for parsing binary files. Ultimately, this led me to create my own solution. While a binary file parser is fundamentally straightforward software, I found the process tedious and overly detailed when done “manually.” In this talk, I’ll cover the different libraries and tools I discovered in my research, which can simplify the task if you ever need to delve into the contents of a binary file.
MicroPython is a lean and efficient implementation of Python 3 optimized to run on microcontrollers and in constrained environments. The goal of this tech talk is to introduce you to MicroPython, explore its history, guide you on how to get started, and conclude with demos on an ESP32. Several demos will be showcased, ranging from blinking an LED and controlling the ESP32 LED via MQTT, to hosting a snake game served by a web server on the ESP32.
In September, there have been 3 important gatherings of open source enthusiasts in Europe: Open Source Summit Europe (which itself is a collection of 18 conferences, an exhibition and some fringe sessions), Linux Plumbers Conference (which is more a discussion forum than a conference and has 33 microconferences an tracks), and Kernel Recipes (which is intentionally kept small, only has a single track, but is very high quality). Several Mind consultants attended these conferences. Arnout will give an overview of the most interesting talks we saw.
A trusted platform module is a security component that provides various features like cryptographic operations, attestation, secret sealing, etc. In this presentation, we will give an introduction to the different aspects of a TPM and present examples of usage. The goal is also to share useful sources to learn about it and make it easier to get started.
In a Mind Tech Talk, one of our expert colleagues will guide you through a specific technical topic, with plenty of opportunities for questions and discussion. These sessions are held every two weeks, alternating between Tuesdays and Thursdays, and are open to everyone interested.
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