Open Source Summit North America 2025

Hardware availability is among the many challenges embedded software engineers face when working on new designs. In the case of MCU-based applications, embedded software engineers need to wait for the hardware to arrive to validate portions of their application that exercise the underlying hardware. Additionally, if the application is part of a network and the network can contain hundreds or thousands of nodes, engineers may find it difficult to evaluate their design when the network is under load. Fortunately, The Zephyr Project RTOS has the infrastructure to allow embedded software engineers to evaluate as much of their design with access to the necessary hardware. In this talk, I will walk through these tools and how they can be used to evaluate the embedded software design before hardware is ready. The tools covered in this talk will be QEMU, BabbleSim, and Renode. They will be showcased with code, invocations, and results to demonstrate their value.