Last week, a handful of Memfolks had the opportunity to travel to Austin to attend the first ever Embedded World North America¹! Embedded World NA welcomed 3,500 visitors and 180 vendors across 3 days². While it was surely a smaller showing than Nueremburg’s Embedded World, we still wanted to quickly touch on our takeaways from the event.

In this post, we will cover what we learned from the first Embedded World North America. Our team had the chance to meet with some IoT device makers and understand what is top of mind for them.

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Table of Contents

• Security regulations heating up
• More AI at the edge and LLM-based tooling
• Zephyr continues to gain popularity
• Conclusion

Three major themes stood out to us at this conference while perusing the booths and talking to developers at our booth: Security, AI, and Zephyr.

Security regulations heating up

Security regulations have become increasingly part of our conversations with IoT companies, and this trend was also apparent at EW. Leaders know that their products must comply with regulations like the CRA and PSTI³. They want to stay ahead as best they can and are worried about getting started too late and missing deadlines. In fact, last week, the CRA was adopted by the EU⁴, marking an important next step in the official publication of this law.

I would be remiss not to mention that we at Memfault have been thinking a lot about security. We have compiled some resources on what to focus on, including IoT Security Best Practices, Cyber Trust Mark Guide, and the CRA Guide. We hope these references are helpful if your team is thinking about how to comply with the new standards!

More AI at the edge and LLM-based tooling

Unsurprisingly, AI continues to be a hot topic, with nearly every semiconductor company showing its own edge AI demos. The Edge Impulse booth also really caught our attention. They had a demo showing a smart litter tray that could use lightweight ML models to learn the habits and track the weight of the cat for better health monitoring. See the cute stuffed cat picture above 😸! Driver AI was another highlight - a tool that automatically creates technical documentation from source code using LLMs. They launched their product publicly this month⁵. I, for one, would love a tool to help understand complex parts of a software stack better!

Zephyr continues to gain popularity

As we also noted in our EW recap earlier this year, Zephyr continued to come up in conversations with developers across the industry. We had a few people ask for advice on selecting the right RTOS, particularly asking for comparisons between RTOSs like Zephyr and FreeRTOS. A Zephyr community member wrote a blog post last year on their transition to Zephyr from FreeRTOS, which you might find helpful if you are considering such a switch. Zephyr was at the ADI booth this year with their signature kite flying to mark the spot 🪁 Zephyr recently hit 100,000 contributions, marking an exciting milestone in its trajectory as one of the fastest-growing open source projects⁶.

Conclusion

This conference was another great opportunity for us to meet a variety of embedded teams at our booth and peek at the latest technology from vendors. No time was wasted in the announcement² – the next Embedded World North America will be in Anaheim next November! We can’t wait to see what the second year of this regional EW will bring. If we didn’t see you this year, we hope we’ll cross paths in 2025.

Shoutout to Memfolks who attended the conference this year and helped put together this post: Chris, Eric, Jon, François, JP and Jesse.

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References

1. https://embedded-world-na.com/ ↩

2. https://embedded-world-na.com/press-releases/first-embedded-world-north-america-ends-in-style/ ↩ ↩²

3. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/the-product-security-and-telecommunications-infrastructure-psti-bill-factsheets ↩

4. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/10/10/cyber-resilience-act-council-adopts-new-law-on-security-requirements-for-digital-products/ ↩

5. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/driver-emerges-from-stealth-with-new-way-write-decode-tech-docs/ ↩

6. https://www.cncf.io/blog/2024/07/11/as-we-reach-mid-year-2024-a-look-at-cncf-linux-foundation-and-top-30-open-source-project-velocity/ ↩